quivo

*slinks back onto dreamwidth* H-hello? It's been a while???

Okay, now that I've dispensed with pretending anyone reads this, down to brass tacks! I'm tentatively planning to work on fanarchive again, with less, idk, worrying about what's expected by random passers-by and more selfish me-first thinking.

Over the last year or so, I've been experimenting privately with static site generators, doing some Python and bash scripting, and poking at WordPress for other projects. I've no idea how what I want out of personal fic archive will square with the shaky foundations I set up using Django. My big dreams of building something for All Fandom have been whittled down to building something I would actually want to set up and maintain for myself. It'll still be a ton of work, but with a much smaller scope I may actually get to some kind of 1.0 sometime soon.

Anyway, when I have an update re concrete decisions/major changes to be made, I'll post about it in fanarchive. Until then, I think I'm going to keep dropping in here to talk about what I'm playing around with at the moment.

When it works, it works, right??

Seriously just feeling the high of having bludgeoned my way towards a vaguely functioning url to markdown python script. Have been testing it on some content I wanted to archive, and am definitely going to get a good deal of use out of it in future :D

There's so many little things that are going right for me right now, in a way I'd never have imagined a few years ago.

It's weird things like my realization tonight, that what I like reading (and writing!) most is time travel fix-it fics, with a heavy emphasis on permanent travel, permanent consequences etc. Having the time and space to read (and write!) lots of different stuff that I mostly liked, until I narrowed down exactly what I liked, well, sometimes it feels like a fucking miracle.

And then there's the fact that I'm some sort of hotshot programming person now?? Time was, if you mentioned Django or Rails, I could tell you what they were, and I could also tell you with absolute certainty that I'd never bother mucking around with them, as that kind of thing was beyond me. And here I am now, agonizing over project structure, struggling to answer the mega-important question of what kind of software I want fanarchive to end up being, and also actually possessing the skills to do it.

Tonight's a good night.

Anyway it's been a month and change. I moved state, sweated over getting a new apartment lease signed, and did without steady internet for maybe half that time? And also furniture. Weirdest thing in all of it was that, as my partner and I got more stressed, our sleeping schedules altered dramatically from "wake at/near 11am, sleep at 3am ish" to us opening our eyes at like 6am on the dot, even when we got to bed at 1a ish. Half of it is that his new job requires going in when they want him there rather than when he feels like it, and the other half is surely that we have become Old.

We're headed out to IKEA today in search of a nice bad couch and various kitchen things (the sheer variety + cheapness of their selection has spoiled me for anywhere else, especially in the matter of things like drawer inserts and the like). I'll probably??? get back to posting fic next week, still on Tuesdays, though it TERRIFIES me because the inbetween story I planned to follow Rosier's novella is not yet done, but. Just this once, I'm gonna wing it.

Not really sure I should be taking time for this when I should be sleeping, or editing fic and/or stressing over the daunting length of my todo list, but omg. Finished posting A Lily Growing Thorns tonight, and I've got another short story prepped to be shoehorned into the series (yeah, I quit posting wips but I guess I couldn't quit the series instinct >.>), maybe something I'll post this week if I can manage it.

Storm of busyness creeping up on me irl, but I don't care. Gonna get some writing done this week, just dunno what or when... I was in a super HP mood last week but I think I might take a break to write/polish something wildly filthy and original. Who knows~

Will finish posting ALGT chapters here, uh, someday.

I can't say enough how good the "finish fic first, then post" model has worked for me. It's been even better to post on a spread-out schedule, because it's letting me do edits and tweak things slightly in reaction to the comments I've gotten. It's almost like some bits of a fic don't quite make sense to me until I'm thinking about showing them to someone else, like what I was trying to do doesn't crystallize until I'm editing with an actual outside reader in mind.

In any case, I am editing ch 5 of A Lily Growing Thorns right now, plus making sausage rolls, and I am so happy I figured out a thorny bit that was confusing me a couple days ago. Back to it...

Once I'm done spellchecking. Which of course I only just realized I'd forgotten to do for the other two chapters... woe.

When you write code you thought you couldn't, and IT WORKS!!1

And then you realize that because it works, you must write more code... ugh...

HORMG I posted fic! For like, the first time in years. It's only on AO3 for now; I'm still wibbling over what the fuck to do with my moribund fic website, so it'll probably not get posted there for a while.

Have also surmounted another perfectionism-related hump, if a small one: I now have a very thin, but actually working python script that will convert a random markdown file to html! I experimented a bit with using pandoc for conversion, but ended up going back to CommonMark's python library because of a frustrating bug I ran into while trying to work with the smart extension of pandoc. I spent what must have been four hours trying and failing to figure out

• How to pass extensions to pandoc properly while using pypandoc,
• Why this one extension (and only this one!!) was throwing an error when I tried to run my script, and
• If there was anything I could do to fix it

In the end, after leaving the problem alone for a couple days, I came back, took one look at the script, and just said 'fuck it, CommonMark it is', although that basically meant having to get into it with Beautiful Soup and HTML Tidy to see if I could make the resulting html look nicer in a specific, satisfying way. Which I'm thinking, more and more, is a fool's errand, half because Python libraries for html prettifying suck, and half because I'm lazy as hell and the html both CommonMark and pandoc spat out wasn't that bad...

So I've been diving slowly and carefully into the hell that is testing and writing tests, and so far, what I've actually had the most problems with isn't trying to figure out how to do things I want to do that the various tutorials I'm cribbing from doesn't actually list examples of. I've had a couple thorny-feeling cases that sorted themselves right out after I did a bunch of frantic reading of the Django docs and some helpful StackOverflow questions.

What I've really had trouble with? Is figuring out what work I should be doing, what tests I should be writing, as opposed to the ones the tutorials try to handhold you through. It's made for a really quite fragmented commit process, wherein I figure out something, hack together a solution, and then frantically try to strip it of dumb bugs in future commits. Slowly, I'm getting better at it pretty fucking slowly, but progress is progress, so I've not lost heart.

I've been turning over the static fic archive idea in my mind, and have now resumed my more practical assessment of it, i.e. that

1. it's dumb and bad (my partner's default stance vs static sites, lol), and...
2. I should just use a gd database, because search + tags is core, core, I say, to the modern fic archive experience, and I refuse to corner case my way towards that.

Whereas, if I stick with this Django thing, I can stick in full-text search with Postgres or MySQL for free, and have a tagging architecture that actually makes sense, and is editable, and integrated with the search bit.

Not taking bets on whether I'm going to find that I have to write a tagging library myself. I'm still trying to hope that the big third-party ones available will somehow suit; if they don't, though, I'm prepared to download them, rifle through their code and steal whatever looks good while implementing my own as part of fanarchive.

Well. Back to tests~

P.S. for new git gits: Do not, under any circumstances, authenticate with git's https credentials bs if you're juuuust getting started with it. The SSL keygen instructions are scary I know, but, istg, it will save you SO MUCH PAIN AND FRUSTRATION later on if you use them, when you decide to switch IDEs or GUI git clients, or switch to a new github account and find that your old credentials Will Not Go Away.

The wrong SSL key can easily be deleted or moved or pointed away from; https credentials burrow their way into your OS'es guts, and linger on in weird fucking places, e.g. OSX's keychain, Visual Studio Code's credential handler, etc etc etc. To the point that reinstalling git is actually recommended as a solution.