meteordust (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
meteordust) wrote2023-09-12 11:36 pm
meteordust) wrote2023-09-12 11:36 pm
Entry tags:
Dreamwidth fic archive
With everything going on with AO3, I figured it was a good time to make a backup archive of all my fic.
It's taken over two months to upload over 120 stories. Which is not as many as some people, but still a fair chunk of work for me.
Anyway! You can find the archive atserenadefic.
I want to ramble a bit about the process, since I've been finding it interesting when other people talk about theirs.
Why Dreamwidth
I used to diligently archive fic on my own website and on Fanfiction.net. But my own website will vanish if I ever stop paying for hosting, and Fanfiction.net doesn't allow fic that's 18+ or RPF. And for both of them, the posting interface is kind of a pain, so I haven't been keeping them updated for several years now.
So I wanted something:
(1) Stable - Dreamwidth has been around for a while and is set up to continue that way.
(2) Comprehensive - Dreamwidth has no content restrictions on fic.
(3) Easy to use - I'm already familiar and comfortable with the Dreamwidth interface.
Journal vs community
In the olden days, I used to post my fic to my LiveJournal, which was eventually imported to Dreamwidth. But I decided that I wanted a dedicated space for a fic archive, separate from my existing Dreamwidth journal.
I considered if I should make a community instead of a journal. But I realised that there weren't any community features that I needed or wanted, so I decided to just go with a journal.
It was a lucky choice. It turns out that in a journal, you can backdate entries and have them appear in chronological order, but in a community, backdated entries still appear in the order you posted them.
So with a journal, I had the flexibility to post entries in whatever order was convenient to me, and know they would all be correctly arranged afterward.
Tagging
The tagging in my existing Dreamwidth journal is pretty haphazard. So I was very excited to be able to design a tagging system from scratch. The backbone of it is tagging fic by fandom, but I might add other things later, like rating or genre. I'm very aware that free accounts have a limit of 1000 tags, so I don't want to go wild and run out.
Chapters, series, and collections
Figuring out how to structure these was a fun exercise. I decided to use a combination of tags and table of contents pages.
For chaptered works, each chapter is its own post, and tagged with the name of the work. In addition, there's a table of contents post that has links to all the chapters.
For series, each work is tagged with the name of the series, and there's also a table of contents post that has links to all the works in the series.
For collections, the same applies.
I decided not to do links to "previous" and "next", because that seemed like a huge pain. But hopefully the above navigation options are easy to use.
Related works
I like that AO3 allows you to link to works inspired by yours. But I've always found it annoying that the related works list is only visible to you. Sometimes I want to know which stories by an author have podfic recorded for them, for example.
One of the tagging categories I decided to add was for related works: art, meta, podfic, and translations. So you can click on a tag and find all the fic that have that type of related work.
Did I mention how much I love tagging?
There's still things to iron out - some italics formatting is causing extra blank lines, and there are miscellaneous ficlets to be uploaded - but the bulk of it is done and I'm pretty happy with it.
It's taken over two months to upload over 120 stories. Which is not as many as some people, but still a fair chunk of work for me.
Anyway! You can find the archive at
serenadefic.I want to ramble a bit about the process, since I've been finding it interesting when other people talk about theirs.
Why Dreamwidth
I used to diligently archive fic on my own website and on Fanfiction.net. But my own website will vanish if I ever stop paying for hosting, and Fanfiction.net doesn't allow fic that's 18+ or RPF. And for both of them, the posting interface is kind of a pain, so I haven't been keeping them updated for several years now.
So I wanted something:
(1) Stable - Dreamwidth has been around for a while and is set up to continue that way.
(2) Comprehensive - Dreamwidth has no content restrictions on fic.
(3) Easy to use - I'm already familiar and comfortable with the Dreamwidth interface.
Journal vs community
In the olden days, I used to post my fic to my LiveJournal, which was eventually imported to Dreamwidth. But I decided that I wanted a dedicated space for a fic archive, separate from my existing Dreamwidth journal.
I considered if I should make a community instead of a journal. But I realised that there weren't any community features that I needed or wanted, so I decided to just go with a journal.
It was a lucky choice. It turns out that in a journal, you can backdate entries and have them appear in chronological order, but in a community, backdated entries still appear in the order you posted them.
So with a journal, I had the flexibility to post entries in whatever order was convenient to me, and know they would all be correctly arranged afterward.
Tagging
The tagging in my existing Dreamwidth journal is pretty haphazard. So I was very excited to be able to design a tagging system from scratch. The backbone of it is tagging fic by fandom, but I might add other things later, like rating or genre. I'm very aware that free accounts have a limit of 1000 tags, so I don't want to go wild and run out.
Chapters, series, and collections
Figuring out how to structure these was a fun exercise. I decided to use a combination of tags and table of contents pages.
For chaptered works, each chapter is its own post, and tagged with the name of the work. In addition, there's a table of contents post that has links to all the chapters.
For series, each work is tagged with the name of the series, and there's also a table of contents post that has links to all the works in the series.
For collections, the same applies.
I decided not to do links to "previous" and "next", because that seemed like a huge pain. But hopefully the above navigation options are easy to use.
Related works
I like that AO3 allows you to link to works inspired by yours. But I've always found it annoying that the related works list is only visible to you. Sometimes I want to know which stories by an author have podfic recorded for them, for example.
One of the tagging categories I decided to add was for related works: art, meta, podfic, and translations. So you can click on a tag and find all the fic that have that type of related work.
Did I mention how much I love tagging?
There's still things to iron out - some italics formatting is causing extra blank lines, and there are miscellaneous ficlets to be uploaded - but the bulk of it is done and I'm pretty happy with it.