skip to content

UltraNormal

The Ficlets Memorial

Finished and installed just in time, the ficlets memorial is up and running. It's on my Dreamhost account, so it's not going to be super speedy, but I've cached as much as I can, so it shouldn't be too slow.

I'm not entirely happy with it, but I didn't have time to do much other than make sure I had all the data and that it's navigable. Thanks to Alexander Grässer, I was able to get all the mature stories as well and now have a full archive of the site from last weekend. The stories should be up-to-date as of this morning, and I'll do another update tonight before ficlets gets shut down for good.

I have more plans for the data, and the design, but they'll have to wait.

Update: Someone asked if they'll be able to "take ownership" of the stories in the memorial. Since I don't have any user data (like how you logged in, your AIM screen name or OpenID), I can't confirm that the person trying to claim the stories is the original author. AOL won't budge on giving me the database, and I'm tired of asking. As for how the original ficlets will be included in ficly, I don't know yet. I'm hoping to at least let people use them as inspiration, but I'm not sure how that will work.

If someone wants to get the stories and do something else with them, I'd be happy to share the data. I'm planning on creating several sharable versions of the data at some point, but I just don't have the time right now. The best I can do is a MySQL dump (which won't help any "normal" people). I've never tried creating PDF's in Rails, so I'll probably play with generating those from the stories (mostly because I'm curious how many pages The Big Book of Ficlets would be), but that will have to wait.

posted January 14, 2009 9:21 AM by Kevin Lawver | | | permalink

Comments:

  • Ana Cristina said:

    Thanks so much for getting the memorial up and running so quickly. I tried backing up everything I could, but was worried some of them may have slipped through the cracks. I appreciate this more than you know, and look forward to ficly! :-D

  • Cobweb said:

    Whoa, you saved the comments even? You have done a tremendous thing! Thanks!

  • Chocobo Prime said:

    My question is, will this memorial archive be built into Ficly?

  • Robotech_Master said:

    Well, it's hosted on the ficly site. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some way to link stories to them.

    I am rather doubtful that we'll be able to "take ownership" of them to edit or delete them, though. There's no way Kevin could confirm that the Robotech_Master claiming to own Robotech_Master's ficlets was the same Robotech_Master who wrote them originally.

  • uselessness said:

    Awesome, it's great! Thanks, Kevin!

  • Will Hindmarch said:

    Kevin, I put another a short keepsake book of some ficlets for a friend of mine as sort of a stress test for another book idea I had (which doesn't seem doable now without funding). Anyway, I'm happy to share the PDF for this little booklet's interior with you. Just let me know where I can email it.

    You can get a peek at it here: http://tinyurl.com/963s9h

  • M. Jackson Wilkinson said:

    My only idea for claiming ownership would be to take advantage of this last day online... If you were to email Kevin a story that you were going to post, waited an hour, then posted the message, then Kevin would have a fairly strong indication, based on timestamp or something, that a given email address is tied to a given ficlets screen name.

    But it may be too late to organize such a thing.

    Actually, now that I look at it, I don't see timestamps, just datestamps, so it would have taken at least two days to make happen.

  • Kevin said:

    If I had really been thinking ahead, I would have put the user's OpenID (or OpenId'ed version of their AIM screen name) in a link in the head of their author page. But, I wasn't. I thought I'd get more time to work on it - and I didn't.

  • Brebelles said:

    Thank you SOOOOOO much Kevin. Your doing a great job. I am very thankful for you. Keep it up!!

  • emily said:

    Ohs nos! I JUST found out that Ficlets closed! I didn't have very many of them, but I'd really love to get them, but I can't find my user name anywhere on the list. What should I do?

Your Name:
Your E-mail:
Your Site:
Your Comment:

You can use Textile formatting in your comments (but no HTML). Here's a quick cheatsheet:

Ugh »
« Ficly: Live After Ficlets
Main