Offering

[zekkass.livejournal.com]

Hallo there!

I have two things.

1. I was wondering - since the Jooster Archives seem to be down, and have been for some time for me, could I offer something?

I am reasonably adept at organizing things, and I enjoy the work that comes along with putting together Master Posts that contain links and summaries of fic as well as author names and other information.

I understand that this would be quite the undertaking - seeing as there is a lot of J&W stuff on the web, and that there will be more in the future, but I would like to try.

So, in short: would any of you object if I attempted to put this together? Also, would anyone be willing to help?

2. I am remembering something from way back in the indeedsir archives, and I can't find it. This is greatly distressing, and if I could have your assistance, I would appreciate it.

The post was a discussion post, and in the comments there was a great string of comments about the idea of abusive!Jeeves. I mean abusive!Jeeves in the sense that he would injure/verbally abuse Bertie - not pleasant, but fascinating. I personally adore the idea of dark!Jeeves, and I'd love to read those again. (And, perhaps, fic? Who knows?)

So! If I could have your input, readers?

Comments

[random-c.livejournal.com]

I have webspace. I keep meaning to put the alt.drwho.creative archive back up, but don't due to arsedness failure. You could use that server if you want.

[zekkass.livejournal.com]

Holy cow. Um. I'd need to have details and assistance, if that were to happen. But yes, please! Thank you!

[random-c.livejournal.com]

Remind me if you want to do it and I'll have a word with the bloke whose box it is.

[zekkass.livejournal.com]

I believe I would like to do it, if I could. I do have questions, though - a) would it cost anything for me? b) What sort of hosting would it be? c) Does the fellow who own the box have a website thing so I can have a look myself?

[random-c.livejournal.com]

a) Nope. b) linux c) nope, but if you have a look at www.panatropic.net on the wayback machine you can see what I did with it... My coding skills are a bit out of date, but I could look at bringing them up to scratch. At least with my code you're guaranteed accessibility...

[zekkass.livejournal.com]

a) Cool. b) I have Linux, so that's good. c) I'd have to do research and whatnot, but there's Google.

[random-c.livejournal.com]

Yeah... my code's all a bit late-90s to be honest. CSS, what's that?! But I was writing a site that had to be accessible to a guy using a DOS browser, so...

[zekkass.livejournal.com]

*grins* I see what you mean.

[random-c.livejournal.com]

However, I believe the machine is currently a LAMP box, so there's rather more scope for what could be done. Creating a site that lets people upload their own fic should be fairly trivial, and the organisation of it could be flexible as well - using user-defined tags, say, with signed-up members able to add new tags to other people's fic as well. Shouldn't be much more work to add the ability to add pictures as well, even embedding them in the fic.
Ut would have to be database driven, but that shouldn't need to be too large, just store the fic file location and the metadata, and it would need a certain amount of moderation to prevent people tagging others fic unfavourably, but this is a friendly fandom so I wouldn't expect too much trouble with that... get the feeling I thought about this a bit when I was thinking about bringing the old archive back? What stopped me there was that I'd have to re-input *everything* and check the authors were all still OK with being archived, and there was a LOT of stuff there.
I've not done any PHP in an *age* but hey, how hard can it be?

[zekkass.livejournal.com]

Ooo. That could be good. I'd be willing to do work with that, as well as with what I was originally thinking. A lot of the work would be data collection, especially.

[random-c.livejournal.com]

Indeed, the hardest part with any archive is getting the fic in there. Making it a community effort makes it a lot easier. I took the alt.drwho.creative over from someone else, and was putting in up to 8 hours work a night on the thing and still couldn't keep up. I tried recruiting helpers to pre-sort the stuff so all I had to do was code it, but there was a limit to how much help they could be. Every fic had to be manually added to every page it was on. However, autogenerated tag-based sorts, with account-holding readers able to add new tags as well as the authors adding tags when they upload makes it all a lot easier.