kerravonsen | Bookmarking Fanfic

Because I wanted a better way of organizing my links collection, I joined Pinboard this year... and then I discovered Shaarli, a web application which allows one to organize and tag bookmarks on one's own web server. So I installed that on my site links page and haven't looked back; I love it.

But that left me with a Pinboard account I wasn't using, because all my general bookmarks were being organized with Shaarli on my own site.
So I decided to dedicate my Pinboard account to fanfic links instead, because that's how a lot of people use theirs. So go to http://pinboard.in/u:kerravonsen to see!

This collection of links is NOT the same as for my Net-Fic Reviews. They overlap, but they aren't exactly the same.

This is my fic-reading-and-reviewing process:

1. Find a story on the net that looks interesting.
2. Use a script built on top of WWWW::FetchStory to download the story and add it to my personal fanfic archive. This is a private website which has a page for each story with info about the story (title, author, universe, summary, characters, category, length, status, rating, ranking, original URL) and the story itself attached to that page (either as an EPUB file or as HTML files).
3. Look through my archive and decide what story I want to read today.
4. Read the story, and write comments about it on the page for that story.
5. Rate the story. If the story is rated Good, Very Good or Excellent, keep the story in the main section of the archive. If the story is Poor or Okay, decide whether to remove the story completely, or put it in the "zoo", which is a section of the archive where I keep stories that I don't want to re-read, but want to remember that fact so that I don't accidentally download them again. This is because some stories which I consider to be poor can be well-loved by some and be recommended over and over again, and if it was a forgettable story, I can forget that I didn't like it the first time, and waste my time downloading and starting to read it again. This is a more recent practice of mine; before I just used to delete them.
6. If keeping the story, change the status from "Unread" to "Needs Reviewing", "Not Reviewing", "Undecided" or "Keeping".
7. If required, write a review for the story on the story page.
8. Every now and then, look at the report-page which lists the "Needs Reviewing" stories that have reviews written, and add a few to the completely separate database that houses my Net-Fic reviews. Re-generate the Net-Fic reviews pages on KatSpace from that database, call a script which semi-automates sending notifications to authors, and then another script which semi-automates posting the new reviews to my journal.

Now, the Pinboard bookmarks are not generated from the Net-Fic reviews database; they are generated from a report on my fanfic archive; for stories which (a) have a URL recorded, (b) are not Unread, (c) have a ranking of Good, Very Good or Excellent.
I just wrote that report this week. It creates a page on the fanfic archive which is in "Netscape Bookmark" format, which can be then imported into Pinboard. This means that I don't have to re-tag everything when I add a link to Pinboard, because the report grabs all the tags that I've already added to the story in my fiction archive. I'm all for using computers to save human beings effort!

Not everything in my fanfic archive has a URL recorded; it's only in the past few years that I've been recording the URL in the fanfic archive. Before then, when I wanted to review something, I had to track down the original URL when I was writing the review, and I figured it would save a lot of time and hassle if I simply recorded the URL when I downloaded the thing. This means that there are stories in my Net-Fic reviews area that aren't in my Pinboard links because the fiction archive doesn't have the URL for them, while the Net-Fic reviews database does have a URL (though the older reviews don't have links to the actual story, just to the site the story was on, because I had a policy back then of doing that; then I changed my mind, but I didn't go back and update the database for all the old reviews).

Conversely, there will be some links in the Pinboard collection that aren't in my Net-Fic reviews database, because either I haven't added the story yet, or because I decided I wasn't going to add it (or because I hadn't yet decided whether to add it or not). Or because the story is Adult-rated. I don't have adult-rated stories listed in my Net-Fic reviews, because I have no way of preventing young and impressionable people from reading the reviews. So, the two collections overlap, but are not exactly the same.

The other difference between my Pinboard collection and my Net-Fic reviews is that the Net-Fic reviews have actual reviews, while the Pinboard collection only has the story summary and tags. Also, the Pinboard collection only has recs, while the Net-Fic reviews includes anti-recs. I decided to do it this way because it's simpler to stick to just descriptions (story summary) with Pinboard (can't control the formatting), and I certainly wasn't going to include anti-recs in that collection without being able to say why that particular story was poor. Lastly, the Pinboard links collection includes Adult-rated stories, while the Net-Fic reviews collection doesn't. Don't worry, they're all tagged as "rating:Adult".

So there you have it. I hope people find my Pinboard fanfic links collection useful.