AO3 Series links

[Mark-Anthony Faiva]

I was just wondering, if there were any plans to provide a way to download whole series with the series link. The reason why this would be useful is because authors can add new fics to the series rather than adding chapters to existing fics, and updating the books in the library wouldn't pick up on that. If there already was a super obvious way to do it, then I apologize in advance, and if there aren't any plans, I'm vaguely aware of python and regular expressions and I'd like to take a crack at it.

[Jim Miller]

FFDL's 'Get Story URLs from Web Page' feature is as close as it gets.
Then copy/paste to the 'Get from URLs' window. Personally, I use author
alerts if I want to follow a series most of the time.

Another possibility is something like FireFox's Update Scanner add-on:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/update-scanner/
I use that to track updates on some non-FFDL supported sites.

The problems with including it in FFDL are twofold:

Technologically: Where would the series url be stored? Maybe if
calibre could store a series link, like it does for author, but it
doesn't. (And author urls have problems, too.) Also, when would FFDL
check for new stories in the series? Every time you check for updates
to any of it's stories? It would be difficult to prevent hitting it
again and again if the user hit update for many stories in a series.

Philosophically: I don't think that users should be using FFDL to poll
for updates to stories as regular practice. It may be easier for you to
select your whole library and hit 'update', but it's wasteful of
bandwidth and server time. I maintain that users should monitor updates
using each site's favorite/alert/notice/whatever feature.

Jim

--
Jim Miller
Retie...@gmail.com

[Montana Harper]

On Friday, January 4, 2013 1:34:41 PM UTC-8, Jimm wrote:

 

Philosophically: I don't think that users should be using FFDL to poll
for updates to stories as regular practice.  It may be easier for you to
select your whole library and hit 'update', but it's wasteful of
bandwidth and server time.  I maintain that users should monitor updates
using each site's favorite/alert/notice/whatever feature.

I don't disagree with you at all on this, but what I'd like to be able to do is have the series page alone as a separate book/document, maybe numbered as zero in the series, so that I had all the individual story titles, tags, and summaries in one place. I don't know if that's feasible, or if anyone other than me would even be interested, but I figured I'd toss that out there.

~Montana

[Jim Miller]

On 1/8/2013 1:56 PM, Montana Harper wrote:

> I don't disagree with you at all on this, but what I'd like to be able
> to do is have the series page alone as a separate book/document, maybe
> numbered as zero in the series, so that I had all the individual story
> titles, tags, and summaries in one place. I don't know if that's
> feasible, or if anyone other than me would even be interested, but I
> figured I'd toss that out there.

Is the goal to be able to easily find all the books of a series on your
device? Because while this might do that, it's not ideal, IMO.

I use calibre's a metadata plugboard to include the series in the title.
Whenever I send a book to one of my devices, I have a plugboard that
sets the title to be:

> {#title_prefix:|| }{series:|| }{series_index:0>2s|[|] - }{title}{#wordcount:| (|)}{tags:| [|]}

#title_prefix is 000 or empty -- used to indicate which are the new
books I haven't read yet, then the series name & number (if present),
then the title, word count and tags. All in the titles as they appear
in the device.

If you want a book specifically, have you looked at calibre's catalog
feature? It's under Convert.

Jim

--
Jim Miller
Retie...@gmail.com

[Montana Harper]

On Tuesday, January 8, 2013 12:10:07 PM UTC-8, Jimm wrote:

On 1/8/2013 1:56 PM, Montana Harper wrote:

Is the goal to be able to easily find all the books of a series on your
device?  Because while this might do that, it's not ideal, IMO.

No, I do that using the plugboard now, and thank you for pointing me in that direction! Mostly the goal is to have all the data about the series in one place so I don't have to open a dozen files on my device to find the single story out of the series that I was thinking of. Also because the idea of having that kind of "table of contents" for a series satisfies some weird OCD thing for me.
 

If you want a book specifically, have you looked at calibre's catalog
feature?  It's under Convert.

I'll have to poke around with that a little and see what it does. I'm not looking for links to the individual stories, but for something similar to a story title page except for the whole series. Basically, if I could just import the series page on AO3 as-is, complete with summaries, tags, ratings, etc, I'd be over the moon. Maybe I'll look at other ways of exporting those pages and manually importing them into calibre.

Thanks for the info!

~Montana

[Jim Miller]

On 1/8/2013 3:10 PM, Montana Harper wrote:
> I'll have to poke around with that a little and see what it does. I'm
> not looking for links to the individual stories, but for something
> similar to a story title page except for the whole series. Basically, if
> I could just import the series page on AO3 as-is, complete with
> summaries, tags, ratings, etc, I'd be over the moon. Maybe I'll look at
> other ways of exporting those pages and manually importing them into
> calibre.

I might do something like a book containing only the FFDL title pages
from the books in a series. Would that suit?

FFDL supports 80+ sites, so I'm all about solutions I can apply to all
of them, rather special features for individual sites.

[Montana Harper]

On Tuesday, January 8, 2013 1:54:18 PM UTC-8, Jimm wrote:

On 1/8/2013 3:10 PM, Montana Harper wrote:
I might do something like a book containing only the FFDL title pages
from the books in a series.  Would that suit?

That would be excellent, if you feel like it'd be of use to other folks as well. 

 

FFDL supports 80+ sites, so I'm all about solutions I can apply to all
of them, rather special features for individual sites.

Absolutely. And I honestly don't know if anyone else would even care about a feature like that, so it might not be worth your time to implement.

~Montana

[Jim Miller]

On 1/3/2013 3:44 AM, Mark-Anthony Faiva wrote:
> I was just wondering, if there were any plans to provide a way to download whole series with the series link. The reason why this would be useful is because authors can add new fics to the series rather than adding chapters to existing fics, and updating the books in the library wouldn't pick up on that.

I haven't spaced this off. I've actually been thinking quite a bit
about how update-able series anthology books might be implemented.

While I think it could be done, it's more complicated than I really
think it's worth. I've put it on the wishlist of 'some day' features,
but it's going on the back burner.

On 1/8/2013 3:58 PM, Montana Harper wrote:
> On Tuesday, January 8, 2013 1:54:18 PM UTC-8, Jimm wrote:
> I might do something like a book containing only the FFDL title pages from the books in a series. Would that suit?

I've thought about this as well. It's awfully special purpose. Unless
there are more people out there how want it, I'm inclined to not pursue it.

Plus I've thought of a couple different ways it could be done with
existing tools:

Catalog version:
- Selected a story in series, search for series (alt-s).
- Restrict to current search.
- Convert Books -> Create a catalog. (could add a hot key)
- Change the E-Book settings to only include Descriptions.
- Generate catalog
- Change catalog metadata - title, series, author.

EpubMerge/EpubSplit version:
- Selected a story in series, search for series (alt-s), select all.
- Run EpubMerge (could add a hot key) - sort by series if not already.
- Finish merge.
- Select new anthology book.
- Run EpubSplit. (could add a hot key)
- Select each title_page.html entry, hit New Book.
- Change metadata - title, series
- Delete anthology book.

[Montana Harper]

Thanks for the suggestions; I'll fiddle around with those methods and see what I can do!

[Jim Miller]

FYI,

I've posted a test version of EpubMerge that may be of interest to
greeniron and other users who want a better way to deal with anthologies
of stories.

It contains a feature to allow merged epubs to automatically be UnMerged
to their epubs stories again. These can then be updated with FFDL
before merging back together again. It's still a several step process,
but it's an improvement.

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2418308#post2418308

I have plans to integrate this with FFDL for a better user experience,
but this is the first step.

Jim

On 1/19/2013 5:21 PM, Jim Miller wrote:
> On 1/3/2013 3:44 AM, Mark-Anthony Faiva wrote:
>> I was just wondering, if there were any plans to provide a way to
>> download whole series with the series link. The reason why this would
>> be useful is because authors can add new fics to the series rather
>> than adding chapters to existing fics, and updating the books in the
>> library wouldn't pick up on that.
>
> I haven't spaced this off. I've actually been thinking quite a bit
> about how update-able series anthology books might be implemented.
>
> While I think it could be done, it's more complicated than I really
> think it's worth. I've put it on the wishlist of 'some day' features,
> but it's going on the back burner.

--
Jim Miller
Retie...@gmail.com