Rant

[Emma]

I have always had a tough time navigating that blog. I can never find the recent posts and assume I have read everything when there are in fact several more chapters available.

[Ximena]

Unfortunately, that's a problem with Blogger... :/

[RyooT]

Am I looking at a different blog than you guys?

The front page looks pretty neat at the moment and if you want just one story click on the story directory link on the right navigation list and it will show about 10 entries for that same story (depends on the chapter length). Then when you get to the bottom click on Older Posts and it takes you to the next chapters...

[janewheeler]

Yeah; I'm not sure how else we'd do it. Either way, I don't think it's changed in a long time.

How would you suggest it be arranged? What can we do better to make it easier for you?

[ruthmadison]

It may be because there are so many people posting that it's getting complicated. It's great that we have all these posters! But there just don't seem to be any platforms suited to the needs of maintaining fiction.

Someone should build a new website from scratch that is perfectly designed for what we are doing!

I wonder whether using blogger to make the stories pages instead of posts would help and then the blog part could be where people let you know about updates? But then you'd have to scroll through the whole story to get to the new part.

[RyooT]

We could create a Google Site that could just link to the individual chapter on the PD author's blog. That would be relatively easy to achieve and provide a different organisation mechanisms. We could have Most recent updates, Author pages and Disability pages grouping stories together, a story page with each link of the story. Have limited time at the moment, but if have some time left over the weekend I can put an example together and show you guys what I mean. That way the story blog itself would remain unchanged as the source of where all the stuff is kept.

[Ximena]

I wonder how you get access to the coding used on a lot of fan fiction-style or free fiction websites? That def is more set up for fiction, but I'm not sure how easy it is to implement/use. And you'd need a domain hosting.

I guess one thing you could do with blogger is create a "table of contents" post; people could use that to navigate through a story instead of having to scroll?

That's the only solution I can think of... At least at 6:30am, lol.

[Ximena]

Lol in think Ryoot and I were writing our posts at the same time. I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but it sounds like it might be a good idea.

[Lee]

I am open to any good suggestions for making the site better. I even put up a post asking for suggestions.

I am going to do a monthly moderator post (I was going to do it every 15th of the month) with updates that month, and maybe this time I'll do it by chapters.

I thought the old stories page was better organized and easier to navigate, yes. But only I could post to it. People obviously really like posting their own stories and I want to encourage that. When I started up, I looked into doing the site like one of the fanfiction sites, but the coding was insane.

If individual authors want to make a table of contents for their stories, that might be a good idea. I can think of ways it might work.

[ruthmadison]

I hate to lose the traffic that we get on the site and start over.

OOOOOOO, I have another idea! If we made "pages" with a tab along the top, authors could put the links to their individual parts in order on their page.

If you don't mind, Lee, I'll test it out and see if I can do it.

UPDATE: I just went over to try, but it looks like the authors don't have enough access to change the layout and create pages rather than posts. So my idea might just end up making more work for Lee, which is not what I want to do! lol.

[ruthmadison]

Sept 15, 2012 6:33:12 GMT -5 RyooT said:

We could create a Google Site that could just link to the individual chapter on the PD author's blog. That would be relatively easy to achieve and provide a different organisation mechanisms. We could have Most recent updates, Author pages and Disability pages grouping stories together, a story page with each link of the story. Have limited time at the moment, but if have some time left over the weekend I can put an example together and show you guys what I mean. That way the story blog itself would remain unchanged as the source of where all the stuff is kept.

I think you and I have the same idea, except I think it's all do-able on blogger!

[Dee Dee]

I think Lee´s suggestion of a table of contents is a good idea. It would give us a much neater overview of each story.

Edited to add; that in the old design, there was some sort of a table of contents, where you could just click directly on a link and get to the chapter you wanted from the front page.

Although, I like the new design a lot (the colours etc.) and want to thank you for "revamping" it.

[Lee]

If authors date the table of contents later than the first chapter and label it with the story name (i.e. chapter one dated July 1 and TOC dated July 2), then if you click on the story name, the TOC should come up first. I'll test it out on one of the stories and you can see how it would work.

[Lee]

OK, I just did it for the completed story A Date to Remember. Now if you click on the label on the sidebar, it will bring you to this:

paradevostories.blogspot.com/search/label/A%20Date%20to%20Remember

It didn't take me that long to do, but I'd shoot myself in the head if I had to do it for every story on the site. So if you like this idea, I'd leave it to the authors to include a TOC if they wanted.

Alternately, instead of making a separate post for the TOC, it could be placed at the beginning or the end of the first chapter.

[RyooT]

Here is the example I put together on Google Sites:

sites.google.com/site/pdstoriespresentation/

Permissions can be given at the page level so the authors for example could maintain their own author pages and collaboratively we could look after the story by disability pages, etc.

Let me know what you think.