Alicornutopia

Apropos of recent discussion of Dreamwidth's limitations as a glowfic platform,

Do I correctly remember something about someone here working on a specification for, or an implementation of, a glowfic-specific web platform?

Can we as a community come up with a vision of what such a site would need to be?

Once we know what we want, we can check if any open source content management software is close enough to edit into shape.

This is fun (1) for the possibility something useful will come of it, and (2) as a way to vent when we're annoyed at the existing systems

(Additional search keywords so I can find this again: requirements document, spec)

Edit: a to do list

I believe it was Marri, but I haven't heard much about the project in a bit.

It's true, I have been slightly missing. Something wedding planning something work something. But I don't mind if people want to test things on the site, on the understanding it's not really done. (Like, this is not beta. This is alpha. Prealpha. Be warned, s'all I'm saying.) And you send me feedback! :) Post here with feedback / requests / suggestions / concrit / whatever, I love things.

Glowfic-specific site. (For the tech-savvy curious, I've been asked, and your password is stored hashed and salted, I as person with database access will not know what it is.)

Things that bothered me about Dreamwidth I have fixed:
- You can edit posts
- You make one account and add characters to it. The post/reply to post forms have a character selector. All posts will display icon (if selected), character name, and glowficcer name.
- There is no icon limit
- There is a Recently Updated page. There is no 14 days limit.
- I am proud of my icon picker. You click the icon on the post you're writing and it brings up a menu of icons with their keywords. Click one to select. On Dreamwidth I was constantly hitting Preview to consider my icons.
- You can load as many posts per page as you like.

Limitations I haven't sorted out yet that can probably be fixed with Heroku plugins if I figure out how:
- You can't upload icons. Workaround for now is probably Imgur or similar sites.
- It does not send emails, and thus (among other related issues) it does not have a secure password reset option. If you forget your password, let me know, I'll change it to something temporary for you and then you can go in and use the Change Password page.

Planned but not yet done
- It does store a full edit history for all posts and replies but they are not yet visible to users
- The database was designed to support thread branching. But only a single level (you can't have a thread branch and then one of its branches also branches) and it's not actually doable from the website yet.
- There's a lot of steps required to set up a character. Adding the template, adding icons, creating a gallery, adding the icons to the gallery, linking the gallery to the user... I'm working on design for it to cut that down. Really the UI in general, kinda wonky at times.
- There's an inbox and an outbox but you cannot actually send messages xD
- Eventually continuity pages should display threads in the bulleted list with subsections format that Effulgence and Incandescence use. Right now they're just forum-style.

Probably more things, but that's the quick brain dump.

Ooh, exciting!

Can you register a domain name for it, perhaps the obvious .net?

I tried to "Sign Up", but it just said "This is in beta. Please come back later."

Iirc the passcode is ALLHAILTHECOIN

Edit: you can register domains through heroku, yes, but I'll probably wait till the site's more done first :)

Marri wrote:It's true, I have been slightly missing. Something wedding planning something work something. But I don't mind if people want to test things on the site, on the understanding it's not really done. (Like, this is not beta. This is alpha. Prealpha. Be warned, s'all I'm saying.) And you send me feedback! :) Post here with feedback / requests / suggestions / concrit / whatever, I love things.

*snip*

Ooooh, Marri, you are the best.

Pretty much what I wanted for the site.

My only suggestions might be:
*Some automated way to upload DW content to the new site, would be good to have everything in one place.
*Some automated way to download this into a mobile format like AO3

I don't understand programming, so I apologize if I just asked something on the level of "your soul" or "your firstborn child"

I've built a scraper, it's the one I repurposed to get Alicorn a dump of the TvTropes forum, but it's waiting on the thread support and the continuity page formatting. I've run it locally a couple times on Effulgence and it's sort of impossibly enormous. I want to say five thousand threads?

When you say mobile format, do you mean a mobile friendly design or a way to actually download something or what?

Marri wrote:I've built a scraper, it's the one I repurposed to get Alicorn a dump of the TvTropes forum, but it's waiting on the thread support and the continuity page formatting. I've run it locally a couple times on Effulgence and it's sort of impossibly enormous. I want to say five thousand threads?

When you say mobile format, do you mean a mobile friendly design or a way to actually download something or what?

sorry, I meant actually downloading? epub, pdf, mobi etc? Not a priority I know, but it felt like a worthy suggestion.

I would be curious how your scraper compares to the ones used for making epubs/mobis currently.