![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
This Folder is Clean!
My New Fanfic folder, it is clean! Okay, it's supposed to be clean, because it's supposed to be just a temporary holding area for stories while I get their Smart Quotes brainwashed and labels assigned before sorting them into their Proper Places. If this is done as stories happen, it takes about a minute a day. When it's not done, and the folder is bulging with over six hundred stories, it takes four or five days.
It took a little longer this time because I have dragged another piece of my sorting system into the 21st Century. Fifteen years ago, when I first started saving fanfic to read offline, I had to scrunch the information into the file name space limits I had. So I came up with a two-letter code system for fandoms, followed by a single-character code for whether the story was het, slash, multiple pairings or gen, then the author's initials or the first two letters of their penname, then as much of the title as would fit. For instance:
st/AN Brilliant Slash Story
or
xf Pn Brilliant Gen Story
The / mark wasn't a very smart move, because it freaked out the Windows computers I imported the files onto, so I eventually replaced it with an "s" to indicate slash stories. I also came up with ways of dealing with crossovers and multiple authors and other things so that the stories would sort within a folder by fandom, genre and then author, so I could then easily sort them into other folders by fandom and author and I wouldn't have to scramble around looking for stuff. That was the theory, anyway.
Over time, however, as the volume of stories began to increase, I found that the two-letter author naming system wasn't working. There were just too many duplicates, and in the last few years I started to confuse myself with my own conventions about when to use just the first two letters, and when to use initials. So, I finally realized that, hey, file names can be a lot longer now, and spelling the author's names will take care of that confusion. (Hey, it only took me fifteen years to figure this out. ;))
So, I had to go through all 600 stories and re-title them as I stripped off the Smart Quotes and put in labels and such. (Thank goodness for the Automator. Multi-file name replace for the win!) It means I had to expand the width of the title field a bit, but that's a minor thing to have all an author's works *really* sort together. :)
Now all I have to do is work my way through the 1,700 untagged stories in the Torchwood folder...
It took a little longer this time because I have dragged another piece of my sorting system into the 21st Century. Fifteen years ago, when I first started saving fanfic to read offline, I had to scrunch the information into the file name space limits I had. So I came up with a two-letter code system for fandoms, followed by a single-character code for whether the story was het, slash, multiple pairings or gen, then the author's initials or the first two letters of their penname, then as much of the title as would fit. For instance:
st/AN Brilliant Slash Story
or
xf Pn Brilliant Gen Story
The / mark wasn't a very smart move, because it freaked out the Windows computers I imported the files onto, so I eventually replaced it with an "s" to indicate slash stories. I also came up with ways of dealing with crossovers and multiple authors and other things so that the stories would sort within a folder by fandom, genre and then author, so I could then easily sort them into other folders by fandom and author and I wouldn't have to scramble around looking for stuff. That was the theory, anyway.
Over time, however, as the volume of stories began to increase, I found that the two-letter author naming system wasn't working. There were just too many duplicates, and in the last few years I started to confuse myself with my own conventions about when to use just the first two letters, and when to use initials. So, I finally realized that, hey, file names can be a lot longer now, and spelling the author's names will take care of that confusion. (Hey, it only took me fifteen years to figure this out. ;))
So, I had to go through all 600 stories and re-title them as I stripped off the Smart Quotes and put in labels and such. (Thank goodness for the Automator. Multi-file name replace for the win!) It means I had to expand the width of the title field a bit, but that's a minor thing to have all an author's works *really* sort together. :)
Now all I have to do is work my way through the 1,700 untagged stories in the Torchwood folder...