I am an avid reader of fanfiction and enjoy collecting all the ones that I just have to read again. The annoyance factor comes from organizing all of my saved stories. Some fandoms are so wide and varied that it is impossible to remember what the names of the favorite I want to read is. Whining aside...
I would like to know if it is possible to create a website like archive on my own computer, a database of sorts, viewable only to me/on my computer to enter all of my saved stories. I like the look and functionality of efiction and would love to have a "fake" site on my computer to hold all of the saved stories.
Even a program that would do the above would suffice but I don't know of any.
Suggestions would be greatly appreciated, even just dropping me a line to tell my I'm way off base would be ok.
You could create an efiction site on your computer (PC or Mac) using something like WAMP or MAMP. This would be rather a lot of work for what you want though.
However, personally, I use Firefox with the Scrapbook plugin and save my favourite stories there. Basically, it creates an offline version of a story or, if you want, a whole site (ffnet might not be a good idea though 😎 ). It will even save pages from the Wayback Machine. I've got hundreds of stories stored that way - no need to paste into word etc etc and you can easily back them up and move them to a new computer if required. I save my favourites without images and styles, so they're effectively very plain HTML and easy to read. I would highly recommend the Scrapbook plugin.
Also, if you've got google desktop (on your pc) or just spotlight (on your mac) you'll easily be able to search & find the story you're looking for.
The idea of an archive in which I could assign characteristics to each story and then be able to use those characteristics to find a specific story or group of stories is what I was going for. That's why the sites that use the efiction format are so appealing to me.
I just wish there was a program of sorts that functioned that way
Then I would look into WAMP/LAMP/MAMP. That stands for [Linux, Windows, or Mac], Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It's basically installing an Apache server with PHP and MySQL on your desktop. This is mainly used by people who want to develop. I tried it long ago on Windows and it was a pain because all the documentation I found was out of date. It might not be so difficult on Linux or Mac. Linux would probably be the simplest since most webservers are effectively LAMP to begin with (although you'd probably need to learn some command line stuff). I'm planning to get that running on my Ubuntu desktop to run the next major update on it instead of the webserver. (There is that pesky MySQL query limit on my hosting account.) When I do I can let you know how it goes.
It's overkill for what you want to do, but the added bonus is that you have a testing environment ready for any actual eFiction sites you might have.
On the other hand, does this Scrapbook plugin allow labels/tags? That might be all you need for categorization, then.
you're probably right about it not being worth the trouble, especially since I know next to nothing about servers, sql, or any of that stuff.
I'm thinking of just using the Scrapbook function of firefox. You can add a description to each "scrap" anf the description is search-able I can create fake tags for my stories. It looks like there is no limit to the description so I can probably add a summary too. That might be my best bet. Normally that kind of thing wouldn't work for me but I have a program that can save firefox settings into a file that can be transferred, and happily scrapbook is included in that so happy happy.
I'm just surprised that there isn't some kind of archive program for fanfiction, I thought the phenomenon that is fanfic was pretty big. I found a few document organizers but most didn't have a search/tag/description function.
Too bad this isn't updated: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1101. Although I guess that's mostly for updates.
There might not be that great of a demand actually, most of the sites I go to and visit regularly you sign up for and once that is done will email you when there is an update to any story you mark as a favorite. But then I probably just have too much time on my hands.
If you want to go the *AMP route, I suggest you use XAMPP. Just do a google search. It's a painless install on Windows and then installing eFiction is just like installing it on a webhost.
As for Story Monitor: I switched to Update Scanner ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3362) a while back. It's not perfect, but I'm mostly happy with it.
I'm running my own private eFiction archive to save some of my all-time favourite stories, but I admit I'm very lazy when it comes to actually uploading stuff. I always wanted to look into one of the many clipping services and see whether they would do want I want. Have you tried something like http://www.evernote.com/ maybe?
