Post by devogirl on Feb 15, 2020 19:59:21 GMT -5
Thanks everyone for the ideas about the stories site that I brought up in a different thread. I didn't want to hijack Annabelle's thread so I'm starting a new one. I am concerned that Blogger, which we use for hosting the PD stories site, may be shut down in the near future. Google hasn't said anything about Blogger yet but they have a history of shutting down services very fast, like happened with Google+. I think it's better to start planning now because we might get very short notice. As for why, well, blogging is disappearing fast, replaced by Facebook and Instagram.
The problem is finding a free site that has the same capability. Thanks everyone for the suggestions. Google Drive might work as an interim backup but it's not a searchable site. Wattpad won't allow us to have a dedicated page that multiple people can contribute to (as far as I know, let me know if I'm wrong). It also requires a fee for the full service. Wix is a paid service that lets you build a website/app. There is the actual Paradevo website, which Lee still pays to maintain. We used to post all the stories there but Lee was the only one with the password and he got tired of doing it. I think it's not a user friendly process to post. But we could go back to that if he's willing to let others post.
I've been thinking about Archive of Our Own, because it's free and not supported by advertising, so it's not driven by market forces and more likely to stay around for a long time. Like Wattpad, we won't have our own page. But you can tag stories extensively; if we develop a Paradevo tag it might hold things together somewhat. We could archive and post new stories there but continue to post links on Blogger as long as it stays open. Right now you have to create the backdated story then a new post with a link to the story; instead of a backdated Blogger post it could be a link to AO3.
Anyway nothing is changing yet. I'm still just thinking about options. If you have any other suggestions, let us know.
And thanks very much queenkala for volunteering to copy/paste stories to a new site, whatever it might be. It will probably come down to that sooner or later and it will be very labor intensive. We'll keep you posted.
