How does she find stories so fast?
Oct. 13th, 2009 09:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danceswithgaryOh, the benefits of obsession and the compulsive need to organize.:-D
When you've collected over 4000 files with Clex stories and 3200 McShep, then it gets a little hard to find what you're looking for. Sometimes I even make it a little harder on myself because I collect multiple stories by an author into a single file (example - NotTasha's gen stories have a logical progression).
When I first started copying stories down to be able to re-read them later, I would use File->Save Page As in my browser and select Type Web Page, HTML Only. As the files accumulated and I started re-reading, I discovered saving that way not only ate up disk space (this was before 100 gig drives were commonplace), but the page would launch in my browser and it wasn't always a pretty sight.
Next I tried highlighting and pasting to a Word doc, which worked a little better. What I then found out was a Word doc ends up being about twice the size of a text file and also didn't display as well on the palmtop I'd started using to read offline.
I finally settled on copy/paste to text files (and isn't that a pain when there are twenty short chapters, which is why I have my multi-chapter stories all-in-one on my website). I knew I was losing any italics or bold, but by the time I'd hit the 2000 files mark it was worth the tradeoff. An interesting side effect is that I think really hard about using italics myself. :-)
Along the way, I also learned that, along with the name of the file, I needed 'by authorname.' I'm still tracking down the authors for some of my earliest saves as I'm revisiting my CLex recs lists. *smacks self in head*
Until earlier this year I was on Windows XP, but my computer fell victim to malware and now I'm on a new laptop running Vista. After a little trial and error, I soon decided that Vista's search engine rocks. In XP, I was limited to a single search string in Explorer. Vista lets me use AND, OR, NOT and multiple strings that allows me to narrow a search down to a lot fewer files I then scan through. Example search: "grabbed his laptop" AND ZPM AND "hazmat suit"
Sorting the files into folders on my drive also helps. I originally added a suffix like (mpreg, hc, redk) to a file name, but they were still hard to pick out of thousands of files. Here's a snapshot of how I now have my SGA files organized with a combination of prefixes and folders(and will have my SV files sorted when I'm done re-reading and reccing).
Hmmm. I see I'm still missing some authors on that list. One of these days, I'll have it all cleaned up. *head desk*
Click for Fullsize
Obviously a story can possibly fall into more than one category. I label it with the one I'd likely search in if I'm looking for a particular fix. Example: A fic set post-S5, Atlantis is still on Earth and Rodney breaks up with Jennifer to end up with John. It could be in the After-Earth-Pegasus folder with a TMP (for only on Earth for a while), but I'd more likely put it in the Episodes-Tropes-Whump with a label of KELLER.
Unread and unsorted files stay in the top-level folder for the fandom. A trick I use when I've fallen behind reading new stories is to copy the URL to the end of the file so I can use it to go back and leave a comment.
I hope that helped. I know there are likely clever add-ons and tools people use to organize the files on their drives, but I subscribe to the KISS principle and I limit the number of programs and add-ons I install.
A final note: BACKUP YOUR FILES. I was truly ready to scream and cry when I thought I'd lost all my stories and screencaps during the malware fiasco. I had the stories on my palmtop, but the last backup had been over a month previous. I managed to retrieve them, but I've been working with computers for years - most people would have lost them permanently.
I have a 32-gig and an 8-gig thumb drive along with a 1-gig card on my palmtop. I try to copy my Stories folder (which includes my own fic) to one of them at least every two weeks, the pictures less often. I don't do it more often because it takes a couple of hours to transfer that many files.
Have fun reading!
When you've collected over 4000 files with Clex stories and 3200 McShep, then it gets a little hard to find what you're looking for. Sometimes I even make it a little harder on myself because I collect multiple stories by an author into a single file (example - NotTasha's gen stories have a logical progression).
When I first started copying stories down to be able to re-read them later, I would use File->Save Page As in my browser and select Type Web Page, HTML Only. As the files accumulated and I started re-reading, I discovered saving that way not only ate up disk space (this was before 100 gig drives were commonplace), but the page would launch in my browser and it wasn't always a pretty sight.
Next I tried highlighting and pasting to a Word doc, which worked a little better. What I then found out was a Word doc ends up being about twice the size of a text file and also didn't display as well on the palmtop I'd started using to read offline.
I finally settled on copy/paste to text files (and isn't that a pain when there are twenty short chapters, which is why I have my multi-chapter stories all-in-one on my website). I knew I was losing any italics or bold, but by the time I'd hit the 2000 files mark it was worth the tradeoff. An interesting side effect is that I think really hard about using italics myself. :-)
Along the way, I also learned that, along with the name of the file, I needed 'by authorname.' I'm still tracking down the authors for some of my earliest saves as I'm revisiting my CLex recs lists. *smacks self in head*
Until earlier this year I was on Windows XP, but my computer fell victim to malware and now I'm on a new laptop running Vista. After a little trial and error, I soon decided that Vista's search engine rocks. In XP, I was limited to a single search string in Explorer. Vista lets me use AND, OR, NOT and multiple strings that allows me to narrow a search down to a lot fewer files I then scan through. Example search: "grabbed his laptop" AND ZPM AND "hazmat suit"
Sorting the files into folders on my drive also helps. I originally added a suffix like (mpreg, hc, redk) to a file name, but they were still hard to pick out of thousands of files. Here's a snapshot of how I now have my SGA files organized with a combination of prefixes and folders(and will have my SV files sorted when I'm done re-reading and reccing).
Hmmm. I see I'm still missing some authors on that list. One of these days, I'll have it all cleaned up. *head desk*
Click for Fullsize
Obviously a story can possibly fall into more than one category. I label it with the one I'd likely search in if I'm looking for a particular fix. Example: A fic set post-S5, Atlantis is still on Earth and Rodney breaks up with Jennifer to end up with John. It could be in the After-Earth-Pegasus folder with a TMP (for only on Earth for a while), but I'd more likely put it in the Episodes-Tropes-Whump with a label of KELLER.
Unread and unsorted files stay in the top-level folder for the fandom. A trick I use when I've fallen behind reading new stories is to copy the URL to the end of the file so I can use it to go back and leave a comment.
I hope that helped. I know there are likely clever add-ons and tools people use to organize the files on their drives, but I subscribe to the KISS principle and I limit the number of programs and add-ons I install.
A final note: BACKUP YOUR FILES. I was truly ready to scream and cry when I thought I'd lost all my stories and screencaps during the malware fiasco. I had the stories on my palmtop, but the last backup had been over a month previous. I managed to retrieve them, but I've been working with computers for years - most people would have lost them permanently.
I have a 32-gig and an 8-gig thumb drive along with a 1-gig card on my palmtop. I try to copy my Stories folder (which includes my own fic) to one of them at least every two weeks, the pictures less often. I don't do it more often because it takes a couple of hours to transfer that many files.
Have fun reading!
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-13 02:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-13 03:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-13 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-13 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-13 05:11 pm (UTC)I am very impressed. And, um, awed.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-13 05:20 pm (UTC)Yeah, those are the actual files. I have more than a few saved that are no longer on the web - the 'Among the Missing' folder for SV.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-14 02:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-14 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-14 06:53 pm (UTC)I guess we all learn through trial and error :D
I started with the copy/paste-into-Word when I had to pay for my internet time. I spent my scarce time (sometimes only half an hour in my Library's single computer) copy-pasting like crazy as many stories I could find in the same Word doc because I didn't have the time nor the prevision to keep them separated. So I ended up with Word docs 1000 pages long with as many fics as I could cram, from various fandoms. By the way, a Word doc starts to NOT work fine when it reaches 1000 pages *duh!* Then, after the internet time ran out, I read and deleted what I didn't like.
After a while, I noticed the problem with organization. I had about 1GB worth of fics in word files under silly names that were supposed to give me a hint about what sort of stories it contained. Yup, things like 'Lemon1.doc' or, if I had felt specially lazy, 'oldfics1' LOL Really helpful :P I even tried to make a sort of index at the beginning of each doc, but I grew tired of it really soon. So I discovered the advantages of having each single fic into their correspondent single doc :D Oi! I didn't even have my own computer by then. All I had were a BUNCH of diskettes. Yup, diskettes, not CDs. Imagine how many :P
As you can imagine, I discovered later on that having those files into different handy little folders for each separate series was convenient too. I inherited my brother's old computer. And I started storing *tehehe* And ran out of space rather quick. I also learned by myself *beams proudly...cough :P* that some authors may use the same name for their fics, so I also learned to use the "by authorname" bit when storing.
I'm technologically disabled :P All I know, I learned by myself via trial and/or error, or with a friend's help and I'm proud of it. Never had Informatics when I studied (*groan* we didn't even had computers then) and my first contact with a computer was when I turned 19 and I moved to England to go to Uni (Sheffield! Yai!). It was like the Meiji period for me, from rural to Sci-fi in under a week :D I swear my first computer growled at me. My friend Siva from Singapore took pity on me and showed me the basics. All this babble is just my roundabout way of saying that I didn't even know how an email worked. Or what a back up was.
Take a guess.
Right! My computer crashed. All my fics were gone. I spent over a month crying on dark corners and renewed my belief that computers hated me. 40GB lost.
Luckily, I have a great memory, so I tried to go back to the sites where I got all my fics from, and I recovered the oldest from diskettes. Some sites had vanished. Sometimes, the fic or author had vanished. But since I was starting anew, I decided to be more organized.
So my folders look similar to yours, but I drew the line at "title by authorname" inside "series" folder. I rarely tag them, and when I like a pairing, I never read any fic with one of the characters paired with another one. My only exception to that is BtVS Spike :D So I don't need to add the name of the pairing as I do when I'm storing artwork ^^
I don't use tags that much because I grew selective on storing and I have good memory, so usually the title or the first couple of sentences are all I need to pinpoint a story. However, I still add some tags like Mpreg or KaLex when I need to point something out. I still keep them in Word format in my PC because I'm in love with how some authors use their emphasis. I carry my PDA around with me when I travel, and my fav stories are stored there in txt. Some of them got ruined when it took the italics off :( I also keep some hyperlinks if the story is a WIP, or if I like the author and I want a quick link to check if he/she has written something new. Sometimes I also keep images in the fic. So, Word it is. And I learned from my mistake: I do backups from time to time, and I have everything stored into different external hard drives just in case.
I still wish I was closer to your level of organization! When I get muddled, I simply run for recs lists *sheepish* I'm happy that you posted this. I've always been curious about how other people store their fics :D
Stopping the babble now. I hope you're feeling better *hugs* Take care!
no subject
Date: 2009-10-14 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-14 07:03 pm (UTC)