shadowkat | (no subject)

1. Eh I broke the Archive of Our Own site again. But hey, I have managed to save the best of the Buffy Meta that I wrote from approximately 2002-2010, along with Dollhouse, Angel Meta, Doctor Who, and Torchwood.

I'm stacking up the fandoms.

It's really fun to archive meta over there - I highly recommend.

Have about 103 works saved to date.

Saved Buffy and the Pitfalls of Television as a work with chapters, which kind of works better than saving it as separate works. Could have done it as a series -- but it's really one work. The chapters make it possible to do footnotes. But I discovered I couldn't do footnotes in their little box for it -- because my footnotes exceeded the little box's character limit. Never go up against someone who went to law school regarding footnotes -- we hide stuff in the footnotes. Academics have nothing on lawyers when it comes to footnotes. Also I do footnotes for my job. (I hate footnotes by the way, but the new Word applications make them much easier to apply so no issues.

2. It's raining here or was. I stayed home. Watched bad television shows in the background while archiving, and spoke to two people on the phone. I'm ignoring the news and anything that gives me anxiety. Did edit a few of the essays I archived, formatting mostly, but I added stuff to some of them.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I broke the Archive of Our Own site again.

Again? You aren't gonna make the internet explode or anything, are you? That'd be right up there with, like, hyena possession.

No. But apparently it doesn't like multiple imports. ;-)

This is very interesting to hear about (I've never used the import function myself, just done c&p as I was often moving things there fairly slowly). When you say multiple, is that more than 1 generally or like 10 at a time?

I've done between 2-20 at a time. It crashes at 20. 10 is about the limit apparently.

And it slows to a crawl when you ask it to do too much or overtax it.

I have about 121 works saved to it. The rest of my stuff is too rambling, or embedded with other non-related items to really count as meta. There are a lot of Buffy Comics reviews -- but I'm ambivalent about importing them. I imported the better ones. Images didn't come over from lj, and I've no clue how to get them on Archive of Our Own, so didn't bring over stuff heavy on images or deleted the images from the essays/meta. It's not really a great platform for "image" heavy meta, although I honestly didn't write much of that anyhow.

Also, I discovered something in going through my journal hunting the meta - for some reason, most of the meta was written prior to 2013. Also stuff I thought was meta, was rambling thoughts embedded with other non-related items. And to post it -- would require a lot of editing and work. I might try at a later date -- if I care. And I didn't tend to work that hard at meta or reviews -- if there wasn't an audience for them. (Example: The X-men and Cyclops meta - got buried in reading memes.) And if I binge watched the series - like True Blood, Breaking Bad, Farscape, and the Wire -- it got no meta really to speak of. BSB, Game of Thrones, Justified, Vampire Diaries, Supernatural, Good Wife, Lost, Expanse, all got rambling reviews as well.

I don't really know why Buffy, Angel, Doctor Who, Dollhouse, and to a small extent Once Upon a Time got meta. Supernatural did get one meta review, as did Farscape. But most didn't. Very weird breakdown. I think it probably had more to do with timing and the specific fandom presence on my flist/journal? I just was more interested in writing meta between 2002-2012, lost interest after that -- as did the people on my journal or their meta interest shifted to shows that well didn't grab my interest. (Try as I might, the appeal of Good Omens is lost on me, for example.)

Thanks for that! I've updated the MMM Challenge FAQ with that information.

Yes, the image issue is a problem for posts that utilize LJ's hosting feature (and probably Tumblr's as well, though I think one can probably copy links from the HTML version of the post). If one wrote HTML links to embed images and the original host still makes them available, then it's simple enough to copy over. But yes, any post that has a bunch of embedded images may well take some time to copy over.

Timing could indeed have something to do with that. I think LJ was a site where meta had a heyday because it could be so easily commented to and spiral outward into new posts. It'll be interesting to see what happens as the Meta Matters challenge gets going, I think a number of people will have interesting discoveries.

Also, I deleted my lj, so if the information didn't transfer - it was gone. For the most part, DW kept the HTML from LJ, but it didn't bring over the images from LJ (possibly rights issues - images have stricter rights issues than text). Also, if your entry links to other lj posts by other people -- it won't work, because a lot of those are long gone.

I had to do a lot of deleting of lj links or defunct links, and removal of images and embedded media. You Tube -- will just switch it to a link, but should be careful, since it may not be what you'd originally intended.

Another thing? Archive of Our Own is more set up for fanfic tags than really meta. It won't take "Non-Fiction" well as a tab. If a fandom isn't already in there, it's hard to add. And it doesn't provide literary references except generally -- I couldn't for example, reference Edna St. Vincent Millay in the tags, or James Joyce.

And it does limit you on how many characters you can put in the summary, notes, and end notes. I had to do the footnotes/end notes as part of the text because I exceeded the character limit. Also couldn't do some of the summary's - too long.

DW kept the HTML from LJ, but it didn't bring over the images from LJ

I think it may have been that LJ never allowed images hosted on its servers to be hotlinked elsewhere, so that's probably why the links broke.

Regarding the tags, it's "Nonfiction", no hyphen. But yes, I expect there will be tags that will have no existing match yet. No worries though, because eventually the tag wranglers will find a way to canonize a new term or link it to an existing one.

The trick with authors is that it needs to be a specific work of theirs that is referenced rather than the authors themselves. For example, here's one for Joyce: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Ulysses%20-%20James%20Joyce and here's one for Millay: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/A%20Few%20Figs%20From%20Thistles%20-%20Edna%20St*d*%20Vincent%20Millay

Interesting note about the character limits! I hadn't run into this before but I imagine you won't be the only one.

Possibly. That actually makes sense. (Images have tricky copyright protections. You can get in trouble much faster sharing and reusing images than text. Text doesn't have as a strong a protection. I could get the rights to text, but not images.)

Ah, no hyphen? Although didn't come up with "Non" either. The tagging was the hardest part. Also, I forgot to indicate "March Meta Matters" on it, and had to go back. Didn't put it on everything ...because...well, 121 separate works. LOL!

My difficulty with meta on the net has always been the formatting/html/tagging details, which I've 0 patience for. Not a formatting nerd. Meta nerd, yes, formatting nerd, no.

You raise another interesting point, which is whether or not works that have been put in the MMM Collection indicate that anywhere. I assume from what you said that you meant you'd forgotten to assign them to the collection when posting. But I also wasn't sure if that status would show up anywhere on the work itself.

The answer is yes! It's in the work header. So thanks for helping me test that out. I'm going to add that reference to the FAQ as well since I might get asked if the participants need to add anything to the Author notes.

There's this "Challenge" section that you have to put it in that I didn't get until after I posted all 121 works. I figured it out when I was trying to post a Drabble for the International Fanworks Challenge -- but apparently you can't indicate that until Feb?

And you're welcome. ;-)

You can always indicate it now. They haven't canonized the "International Fanworks Day 2020" tag yet but once they do it'll get filtered together with all the challenge responses.

There are a lot of big time meta writers out there -- who have either left the fandom or just lost a lot of their meta in the abyss of live journal. I can think of couple off the top of my head - superplin, masquerade, alcibades, matcha, gabrielleabelle, frenchani, aycheb,maggie2maggie, localmax, buffyannatator, rahael, shipperx, selenak...

I did boost the signal to some of them on FB and on DW. But I don't know if they saw it.

That list of name brings me back. I recognize over half of them.