Dorothy Marley's Journal

I just finished adding publication years to all my Delicious bookmarks. I started doing it to the new bookmarks back in November, but I had an enormous backlog that could only be tackled by loading every freakin' story and looking at the date on it. (If there was an easier way, don't tell me. Please.) I was able to use the bulk edit function, so at least I only had to make two or three passes to get a bunch of bookmarks done at a time. It was the only thing that saved me.

It was tedious as crap, but the task did give me a chance to check for broken links, and also replace all the "+" signs with spaces on the Livejournal tag links so they'll actually work again.

Statistics

Bookmarks updated: 1 Gazillion (Okay, about 1,200. It just seemed like more.)
Broken links deleted: 13 (Surprised it was that few, actually)
Journals deleted while I was updating links to them: 1 (ETA: Journals un-deleted the following day: 1)
Bookmarks eaten by Delicious: 1
Number of times same link subsequently eaten until successfully re-added: 3 (Suspect Delicious may be getting wise to 50-tag workarounds. Also, yay for backing up Delicious bookmarks a lot.)

( Breakdown by year, if you're interested )

Click the cut to see what Torchwood stories I've tagged on Delicious today

( Daily Torchwood Recs )

Bad news first.

I had a talk with my physical therapist yesterday about DragonCon, and while he didn't say "don't go," the things we talked about led me to the conclusion that going would not be fun. Everything I want to do involves either standing in line (or sitting on the floor in line) or sitting in horrible hotel conference chairs. I finally realized that I would either be in the hotel room lying down, or in a lot of pain. While the opportunities for hotel-room socializing are not to be discounted as a primary factor in my going to the con in the first place, I finally realized that I just wasn't prepared to face the prospect of the pain involved to do anything else. Such as drive five hours and haul my luggage through the Atlanta subway. So, I'm staying home.

The silver lining to all this (there's always one :)) is that I'll be able to maybe do some bookmarking. I've been trying to figure out a way to cross-post my Delicious bookmarks directly to my journals. I've been using the always-awesome Text Wrangler to code my finder lists by hand, but it would be nice to have a way to share the links.

This can be done from Delicious with other blogs, but not with LJ-based clients. I know there are a couple of scripts that can do it, but I don't have the hosting capabilities to run them. I'm experimenting with Twitter, but the automatic Tweeting from Delicious doesn't seem to work, at least not from the LJ add-on window, and doing it from the Delicious site is a royal pain in the ass. We'll see how it goes. :)

ETA: Ha! Figured out what was wrong with the auto-Tweeting from Delicious. I've now set up LoudTwitter, so hopefully my links will now funnel back onto my journal (under a cut, of course :)). Right now, I'm only doing it on Livejournal to test it.

Right. I'm going in. Eleven days of Torchwood fanfic, waiting to be read and tagged. And because I love my mother and am currently using my Mac to rescue the files from one of her iPods, I'm even doing it without TextWrangler. Think of me fondly.

Okay, I'm cheating, because this isn't an actual story list. Or rather, it's kind of an on-going story list.

What with the recent airing of "Children of Earth," the Torchwood fanfiction community has been--understandably--a bit overwhelmed with stories about the mini-series. In an effort to aid those readers who a) might not have seen "Children of Earth" yet or b) want to take a break from reading about "Children of Earth," I have (inspired by zortified) added a "nochildrenofearth" tag to my Delicious bookmarks.

http://delicious.com/dorothymarley/nochildrenofearth

These are stories which contain no spoilers about "Children of Earth," and do not take place during that time period of the series.

I've only tagged back as far as July 6th, the day "Children of Earth" began to air. If you want to read non-"Children of Earth" stories I bookmarked before then, just go to the main bookmark page and scroll/page until you get to July 5th. You're safe from there on back. :)

ETA: Playing the part of my brain, adina_atl has reminded me how easily the Bulk Edit function works (we won't mention that I used it to add the new tag to all the recent stories and then failed to think about the fact that it would work on all my tags at once, no really), and I've gone ahead and tagged all my bookmarks with "nochildrenofearth" as appropriate. That means that if you begin by using that tag and keep adding other tags to it (there's a list of + tags to the right when you get to the bookmark page), you will not encounter "Children of Earth" stories. Yes, it means that a huge majority of my bookmarks are tagged that way, but that's not really a problem and it does mean that readers can surf un-spoiled. I hope. :)

For those who do want to read more stories about "Children of Earth," I've tagged everything having to do with it with "spoilers:childrenofearth." I've also tagged most of the stories "torchwood:series3" and, where applicable, "torchwood:post-series3."

Also be aware that the "torchwood:post-series" tag--which covers stories that take place in the far-enough future to be unlikely to ever be covered by canon--may include "Children of Earth" spoilers even if there's not a specific Series 3 tag. In that case, there will be a "spoilers:childrenofearth" tag in place. As a final warning, be aware that some of the tags on "Children of Earth" stories may in themselves be spoilers.

(ETA September 6, 2009: It's been two months now since "Children of Earth" aired, and most communities have eased up on spoiler protection. I've thought about whether or not to stop using the spoiler tags, and have decided that, for now, I'll continue to use both the "nochildrenofearth" tag and the "spoilers:childrenofearth" tag for at least another month. It's very likely that I will eventually drop the "spoilers:childrenofearth" tag, but I may continue to use the "nochildrenofearth" one, simply because I can see where readers might want to filter those stories.)

I am actually caught up listening to Dan Patrick. For a while there I was so far behind that I was listening to them fill out their brackets after North Carolina had already won the championship. Now I can get back to the three weeks of Science Friday I'm behind.

Speaking of catching up, I am now *back* up to 37 stories under my "totag" tag on Delicious. I'd knocked the list down to nearly twenty last week, then I did some story finding and committed my usual shortcut of throwing up the tag that fit with the search with a "totag" slapped on. I think I'll make it my goal this week to finish the tagging, because it's not very useful if all my new links just say "totag."

I've also been reading some of my old fanfic, as I prepare to post it on Dreamwidth. It doesn't suck nearly as much as I thought it would (or perhaps as much as I thought I should think it should). Granted, I have fifteen glorious years of suck-filled fanfic lurking unposted and (thankfully) unseen behind the first stories I post ten years ago, but on the whole, it's not so horrible that I feel the need to purge it from the internet. I itch to do some revising, mind you, and there are a couple of early stories that really do need to sort of be re-done top to bottom, but more in a "let's scrub everything and re-paint the walls and get new furniture" kind of way rather than "my god we're going to have to raze the site and start over."

The experience, though, kind of led me to thinking about certain truths I think about myself as a writer, which I may elaborate on later. Or not, depending on how the re-tagging goes.