Miscellany

[sholio]

(Am currently staying with relatives, so Internet access may be slow/infrequent. Please be patient with any comment-response slowdowns that may occur!)


sheppard_hc is currently taking signups for their fifth Secret Santa exchange. (Five years? Really? OMFG, I've been in this fandom a long time ...)

penknife has an interesting post on using AO3's new ficathon-running tools, for those of you who are running or thinking about running ficathons. (kristen999 might find this useful, especially.) I am almost certainly going to be running SGA Genficathon on AO3 next year .... though I will still have it available on LJ (and, by popular demand, DW too!) for people who don't have AO3 accounts and don't want them.

Next year's Genficathon will be sort of an experiment, actually ... I really want to it to be as accessible to different areas of the fandom as possible, so I'm planning on having a presence on AO3, LJ and DW, and seeing how that goes and whether I can run it in all three places simultaneously and as seamlessly as possible. I will defer to authorial preference as much as possible on where your story is hosted, but what I'm thinking of doing with most of the stories is having them on AO3 and then linking to the day's stories from the LJ/DW account, kind of like roga did last year with purimgifts. Hopefully it doesn't turn into a giant muddled mess ...

I will admit right up front that I was terribly skeptical about AO3 when the idea was first announced, but so far, I am loving the heck out of it. I've been crossposting most of my newer fic there, and I've uploaded most of my older one-night-fandom fic (the random stuff that I wrote over the last ten years as I bounced in and out of little fandoms). I haven't gotten around to uploading the fic for my three big fandoms, i.e. the ones that I wrote the most for (Trigun, DBZ and SGA) but it's all on ff.net or my SGA fic page, and I'll get there eventually.

I haven't posted to ff.net since ... 2008, I think? I keep thinking that I ought to go upload my Avatar fic at the very least, but then I remember how frustrating and unpleasant I find the ff.net upload interface, and I can't bring myself to bother with it. But AO3 -- I give it three thumbs up! I love the upload interface, the after-the-fact editing capabilities, the tag searching (though I wish very much for a tag-exclusion feature; I hope they add that in a future update), the reading interface, the fact that so much odd and obscure fandom fic is available on there -- no longer than it's been around, it's already become my new one-stop-shopping site when I get into a new fandom!

Hmm. Other stuff:

For people who are either moving to Dreamwidth or starting DW journals (obligatory disclaimer: I'm in both places but mostly on LJ, and don't really mind where you are as long as you don't mind where I am, etc), rydra_wong has a newbie's guide to getting started on DW that looks very useful! And she has awesome Follow Friday posts with links to useful/fun/cool/interesting DW users and communities to read.

I'm crossposting most stuff now except for the non-fannish posts, though I back up my LJ periodically on DW (which means the personal stuff get moved over in the backups too). I still dislike crossposting; I don't know for certain why, because it isn't that much of a hassle -- it's just a me thing, I guess. I just don't like it. It adds an extra level of difficulty to coding posts and putting in links, and it spams me with crosspost notifications (OH MY GOD I HATE HAVING MY INBOX FILL UP WITH THOSE). I tend to edit my posts five, six and seven times after I post them, which means I get a ton of notifications for every post.

But I adore the importer, which is a thing of beauty and has never failed me, and I find DW much more streamlined, cleaner and easier to use than LJ. The more LJ changes its interface, the less I like it. (Ask me about my loathing for the way it "suggests" tags now, for example. It wasn't broken, LJ, so stop trying to fix it!) And the more of my flist moves to DW (as well as new DW-only people coming in), the more I want to have a presence in both places so as to interact with people on whichever platform they prefer.

I've got a bunch of Avatar meta I want to write too, but I can't get it to coalesce in my brain ...

Comments

[susnn.livejournal.com]

I'm late to the ball on the this but I really have to ask, is anyone else having consistent trouble getting on AO3? It takes forever for the site to open for me and while it is doing that, it locks up every other function. I can't even get the cursor to move much less access another tab. I also suspect I've picked up a virus or two from it. Does it work better if you actually join AO3? Even if you have nothing to, you know, post?

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Hmm, that's really frustrating, because I don't want people to be shut out of reading the stories if I move to AO3! I've never noticed any difference in how well the site works for me when I'm browsing logged out or logged in. Could it maybe be a browser issue? I was having weird problems on Dreamwidth that no one else seemed to be having, which turned out to be caused by me using an older version of Safari. AO3 does say in their known issues section that the site doesn't work very well with IE6 and they recommend using something else (they do say that installing Google toolbar in IE6 will fix the problem for some reason).