Need HELP! Argh.

[fignewton]

So the Alphabet Soup is finally, finally practically ready to be posted as a complete anthology. We've got 26 fics for 26 letters from 25 authors. All I need is one more URL and I can post.

YAY.

Final tweaking of HTML is always a nightmare, but I seem to have gotten all the accidental extra spaces removed and misplaced quotation marks dealt with.

YAY.

Test post on LJ with the very, very abridged version works.

YAY.

Er. I believe I mentioned that we have over 57,000 words of crossover glee here? Some 20,000 more than any other Soup?

...And that it comes out to 332K as a text file, after all cuts and links and URLs have been included?

332K is the same thing as 332,000 characters.

The limit here on Dreamwidth is 300K.

::headdesk::

When I tried my test post, it got partway through the letter U. ARGH.

I can't strip out all the coding. A lot of it is usernames and links to the author's own journal. Yes, there's about 3-5K I could strip out that would make the anthology much more difficult to navigate, but 5K doesn't help when I'm 30K over the limit!

I do not want to break it up into two posts. (Even the thought of having to redo all the HTML makes me quail.) Any suggestions what I can do here?

(And no, please don't suggest AO3 - I have personal reasons not to archive there, I'm sorry.)

Comments

[minxy]

Include the U-Z in the first comments?

Or host on a private server?

[thothmes]

I don't do much posting that calls for a great deal of complicated HTML (and for good reason - I score in the 40th percentile for clerical speed and accuracy, so my ability to screw up HTML has got to be somewhere up in the 98th percentile!) but if you take the original 332K document with its HTML and cut and paste to make a second document, how much HTML would simply port over with the cut, and how much would have to be revisited?

I wish I could offer a better suggestion than the dreaded two posts, but I can't. I sincerely hope that someone out there with more geek cred than I can.

[fignewton]

The first comments thing has possibilities... but if it was your fic, would you want it relegated to the comments? Sigh.

A private server would demand actually having one! :)

I settled on asking the authors of the two longest fics if they'd be willing to have their stories linked at a continuation point, and they both agreed. Happily.

Thanks for the suggestions!

[fignewton]

Making it into two posts would've messed up the links from fandom to fic and back again. Very messy, as it was numbered alphabetically, but the fandoms themselves aren't in alphabetical order in the Soup and (to quote Jack) gah!!

We settled on Aelf and Suzannemarie agreeing to have their fics cut off partway (they're the longest ones) and continued with a direct cut to that point of the story on their own journals. But thanks for commiserating. :)

(also, your clone!Jack icon is LOVE)

[aelfgyfu_mead]

In the "extremely dubious honor" category, I've begun to wonder and finally must ask: I wrote the longest Alphabet Soup entry in this round. Is it the longest ever?

[fignewton]

Ha! I would have to check. I know we've had at least one other 8,000+ fic before. It's a tie between you and Redbyrd, I think. :D