EA Forums

You just get that script written right up and send it over, CG; I'm sure talula will be glad to be saved the duty of doing it.

curious_guy (imported) wrote: Wed Sep 07, 2011 6:55 am I agree with all of the points you have made. I think it might be time to add an index by author. When I find a story on the EA or a book in the library I like, I usually read everything I can find by that author. I think many other people do the same thing. With the present system, users cannot tell who the author is without opening the story.

Hey curious_guy.

It is coming. Sooner or later it will happen. Tal is working on a lot of stuff right now. When it is finished, the EA will have one of the finest story sites on the internet.

Right now the focus has been on getting the stories back, and formatted for the new site. We should all be happy that the stories are back whatever form they appear in right now.

We're all working feverishly to get the stories back on line. Please be patient with us. There are a HUGE amount of stories, and it takes a HUGE amount of time. I've been editing stories since I got up today, and I've only got through about 40 or so. There is something like 10,000 to complete.

It may actually take a year before the new site is fully operational. I for one, can wait. Believe me, it is going to be worth it.

I just did one that took me almost an hour.

For ONE story.

It was long, and had NO paragraph breaks due to all the times it's been 'reuploaded' in the crashes.

It wasn't fun.

IMHO there are a number of junk stories, often under 500 words, that it would probably be ok to skip. Also the very poorly formatted stories may not be worth saving if they are badly written too.

Thanks for all of your hard work on this, really pleased with your progress. Hope you can add an option to upload new stories in the next few months too.

Paolo wrote: Wed Sep 07, 2011 12:39 pm I just did one that took me almost an hour.

For ONE story.

It was long, and had NO paragraph breaks due to all the times it's been 'reuploaded' in the crashes.

It wasn't fun.

I didn't realize what the problem was until I tried one of the longer - no parsed stories -. I had to take it to Word, and even there, it's going to be a while getting through it. I like the story, but it's a multi-part story that's going to take a long time to finish. When I took out the format code at the top of the story using Tal's editor it dumped every line break in the story, so my choice was to figure out where every line break belonged or to export it to Word first.

The story is First Boy, posted by anonymous, but Ganymede is listed in the body of the story as the author. Not a bad piece of writing from what I've seen so far. Anyone know Ganymede?

One of my new favorite stories was one of Ganymede's. One called Worm-hole. It was a disaster when I found it, and took quite a bit of thinking on my part to properly edit it. I have something of a feel for editing that author. I might have a go at First Boy. I'll try a different part if no-one is offended.

Okay I finished First Boy 5.

Wasn't too hard. I just had to add in the paragraph breaks manually in OpenOffice.

The trick is to copy the source into an external word processor, and not flip back and forth between "Source" and normal mode in the online editor. If you flip back and forth before you have the HTML fixed, you create far too much work for yourself.

Here's the order you work in.

1) Open the story in the editor.

2) Click "Source"

3) Copy the source HTML of the story into an external document editor like OpenOffice.

4) Remove all extraneous HTML code. (basically anything except <p> and </p>)

5) At all breaks in paragraphs, if it isn't already there, add <p> (better to copy <p> to the clipboard, click where paragraphs end, and hit Ctrl + V... Very Fast)

6) Copy the text from the external word processor back into the online editor. (Make sure to get rid of the text already there BEFORE you paste the corrected version.)

7) Click source and look at your repaired product.

8) Make final adjustments, spell-check, and submit.

Cainanite (imported) wrote: Wed Sep 07, 2011 11:10 am Hey curious_guy.

It is coming. Sooner or later it will happen. Tal is working on a lot of stuff right now. When it is finished, the EA will have one of the finest story sites on the internet.

Right now the focus has been on getting the stories back, and formatted for the new site. We should all be happy that the stories are back whatever form they appear in right now.

We're all working feverishly to get the stories back on line. Please be patient with us. There are a HUGE amount of stories, and it takes a HUGE amount of time. I've been editing stories since I got up today, and I've only got through about 40 or so. There is something like 10,000 to complete.

It may actually take a year before the new site is fully operational. I for one, can wait. Believe me, it is going to be worth it.

Is the current plan to delay the author index until all the stories are back up?

Talula is writing an indexing system now, when he has the time. When it will get done and be online is up to him.

You know, this makes me think of an alcoholic whining about not having champagne when there's a perfectly good case of beer sitting right next to him.

Thank you! You brought back a interesting part of EA