Thoughts on Dreamwidth and fandom

[fignewton]

I was away for most of two weeks, and a lot of dust has settled in the meantime. :) Time to find more ways to make this place feel like home!

Here are a few links I've found helpful:

zvi explains in careful detail how a person on LJ can follow posts on Dreamwidth. Also included in this is how to create feeds, which I reverse-engineered, so to speak, to make a feed here on DW for LJ. :)

cesy has a nice round-up of useful links and suggestions for people just joining Dreamwidth. Pay particular attention to her listing of the HTML coding changes from LJ's usernames, LJ-cuts, etc.

ivorygates describes, step-by-step, how to apply a different style to your DWJ. I've never gone beyond the absolute basics over at LJ, and I had no trouble following this.

There are some things I'd like to figure out, though. I use Firefox's LJ extension, and I love it - especially the automatic notification when my flist has been updated, the ability to open LJ-cuts right on the page, the automatic expansion of collapsed comment threads. I also use several Greasemonkey scripts, particularly LJ: Taglister, which fetches your taglist and allows easy one-click use for multiple tags without resorting to the CTRL key. Do such helpful scripts exist for Dreamwidth already, and if they don't, is anyone working on things like this?

On the SG-1 fandom side of things, here are a few feeds from LJ that you might enjoy landing on your reading page. Bear in mind that LJ cuts don't translate in a feed, so (for example) your Redial recaps will be on the long side. :)

redial_the_gate_feed: Redial the Gate, the marvelous comm where we rewatch SG-1, one episode a week, complete with recap and fanworks and meta and squee. Why, yes, I am a mod there. Why do you ask? ;) We're nearly finished with S4, so if you want to join us for S5, now's a great time!

sg1_debrief_feed: SG-1 Debrief is the directory for SG-1 fandom on LJ. If you want to stay current with the fandom on LJ, there's no better resource. (Disclaimer: I do some tagging for Debrief, but my efforts are minor compared to the others who make Debrief such a marvelous part of SG-1 fandom.)

stargateficrec_feed:Stargate Fanfic Recommendations been around for five years. And I've been reccing there for three. Over 450 recs and counting, and other than fifteen or so, all gen. :)

Speaking of reccing - I have learned that you cannot import to a community here at Dreamwidth, so my original plan to make my rec archive at sg1genrecs won't work out. I'll be using it temporarily to mirror my recs at Stargateficrec until I get a chance in open beta to set up a DWJ archive of my own. When that happens, I think I'd like sg1genrecs to become a community where anyone (not just me) could post SG-1 gen recs. Does anyone out there suppose there would be an interest in that, or should I just stick to my own recs and leave it at that?

On another note, I'd be interested in knowing what people generally think about inserting site meters or trackers into posts in order to know how many hits a particular entry has received. On LJ, I used LJ Toys Monitor on my fic and meta posts. I liked that it told me what pages on my LJ were being visited, but I am less than comfortable with the specific targeting of who is doing the visiting. I feel somewhat... I don't know. Big Brotherish, I suppose. An alternative would be a regular site meter, but that would (I think) only give me totals, not daily numbers.

So, two questions: is there any widget out there that would track for me the number of hits a particular entry recived on a daily basis, and e-mail me those numbers (or have a webpage that I could visit to get that information) - without tracking locations? And whether or not such a widget exists, how do most people feel about such tracking widgets? Are they intrusive, or merely a useful tool? Or somewhere in between?

Comments

[yvi]

Does anyone out there suppose there would be an interest in that, or should I just stick to my own recs and leave it at that?

I'd be interested! My reading is shifting towards gen fics at the moment and I like the idea.

On another note, I'd be interested in knowing what people generally think about inserting site meters or trackers into posts in order to know how many hits a particular entry has received.

I block them with NoScripts :) So basically you won't see whether I am doing and I can imagine others use it as well. I don't like those lj-tys etc. things.

[fignewton]

Yes, it's ironic - I use noscripts too. :) So what point does it serve? OTOH, I do want to know what people - people in general - are reading. If nothing else, it gives a warm and fuzzy feeling to know that someone has been reading an old fic, even if they don't leave feedback. :)

What about archives with e-fiction that track number of visits per page? Are those blocked with NoScripts as well?

[yvi]

Number of visits is usually 'server side', so it can't be blocked. Same with IP-addresses logging, it can be viewed by the site administrators - so LJ will know someone visited that page. Lj-toys and such are different and thus require JavaScript.

If nothing else, it gives a warm and fuzzy feeling to know that someone has been reading an old fic, even if they don't leave feedback. :)

I'd like to know that, too, but I don't feel reading something that I don't want other people to know of me - things like how many times I check my f-page is something I feel really uncomfortable with people knowing.

[fignewton]

Aha. Thanks for the clarification vs logging and scripts.

Re how often a person checks their flists (or reading page, heh) - if the tracking bug (or whatever it's called) is behind a cut, it won't be affected by refreshed reading lists, but only by someone actually opening it.

[yvi]

I like that version much more. A few people on my LJ-flist use LJ-toys and that's linked to the modd icon, so it's always loaded.

[fignewton]

LJ toys offers two options: to have a "mood" icon that's actually a javascript bug (or whatever you call it), ot to manually insert a one-pixel javacript bug into your post. Since I don't use mood icons at all, I've opted for the latter - and since you can put it wherever you want, I do it behind a cut.

(also, it gives a more accurate counting than if it's activated, as you say, everytime someone reads their flist.)

[yvi]

I like how you do it. It's really way less intrusive than the mood icon variant, which gives me a 'there is JavaScript stuff on this page that you are not allowing' every time I hit refresh - that can be a bit annoying.

[denise]

We're going to be integrating Google Analytics for paid users, so you can get basic information about who views your entries. (It won't show things like how many times people reload their reading list or anything, just when the entries themselves get visited.)

[fignewton]

Oh, thanks for this tidbit! Very good to know. Whether I'll be able to afford a paid account is another question entirely, but that's beside the point. :)

[yvi]

That sounds wonderful. Are there already plans to whether we will be able to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics, or is that only possible by blocking the JavaScript it uses?

[denise]

Blocking the JS, yeah. We decided not to add in any kind of opt-out because it's not enabled by default -- it's up to the individual journal owner to use it or not -- and there's information in the Privacy Policy for how to block it.

[cnidarian]

Really useful post, thank you. One thing I'd like is the option to have comment notifications delivered to my gmail inbox without going to my DW inbox. Unchecking that option takes them both away.

[fignewton]

Glad it proved useful! :)

I'm pretty sure that comment notifications are automatically delivered to your inbox in LJ, too. The difference is that the LJ inbox is so hard to find I've had to bookmark it! Having a direct link on the page is inifinitely better. :)

[cnidarian]

Huh. You are quite right, the settings are the same, but that's really odd because the only things I get in my LJ inbox are LJ news things and birthday alerts (and PMs of course). *shrug*

[traycer]

Wow! This is a fantastic resource, and already is helping me to figure out which codes to use to differentiate DW and LJ users. I admit that I was having trouble with that stuff. :)

Thank you!

As for a widget that tracks hits, as long as they just tell you an unidentified somebody looked at an entry, I would think that'd be great. Like you said in your entry, it gets intrusive when it tells you the IP address or something like that. *is creeped out just thinking about it* It would feel too much like someone is tracking my web surfing habits or watching over my shoulder.

Now with that said, the hit counter on ff.net is nice, but after a few days from when a chapter is posted, I don't even bother looking at them anymore. They don't seem to mean a whole lot when it could mean that the same person went to the next chapter, then hit the backspace key, then go on to a subsequent chapter, and so on. It loses its effectiveness that way.

Besides, it got kind of discouraging to note that 100s of people hit on a story and only 5 or 6 people left reviews. So I suppose it could have it's bad side too.

[fignewton]

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. :)

Regarding the discouragement of 100s of hits vs 5 or 6 reviews - well, to be honest, that's exactly why I'm interested in knowing when a page has been visited. 5 or 6 percent is actually an excellent reader-to-feedback ratio, believe it or not.

In my old fandom, a person mentioned on the message boards that she'd gotten so little feedback on a recent story that she wondered if her characterization had completely failed. (Not someone seeking stroking, mind you - it was a sincere question.) The archivist of the fandom's main archive responded by posting the hit stats for her story on the archive: something over 300 in two weeks, which is pretty good for a smallish fandom. And she'd gotten perhaps two or three responses from all those readers! (And this isn't ff.net, where you'll get not-so-real hits - this is an archive that leads you to a text file of the story.)

I guess it's interest, and a little self-gratification. It amuses me to see SG-1 Ninja Style getting regular visits, for example. I never claimed to be unshallow, after all all. :)

[lavenderlocks]

Thanks for the links to the comms - I have added them to my reading circle. :)