Ficly

Something New and Different

Me, I love new and different. One of our many family mottoes growing up was, “Weirdness is greatness.” Some of us took it a little too far, but that’s beside the point.

Back to the point, Sir August Rode has come up with something new, different, and completely outside my scope of expertise. Below I quote his explanation.

“I’ve very nearly completed writing some software that will allow me to automatically generate eBooks from Ficly content. I want this for my own purposes as I often travel, and reading an eBook on the plane is easier that carrying paper books around. Anyway, I’ll be generating monthly digests of the Ficly stories, and it occurs to me that as long as I have these, I could easily make them available to other Ficly members. In addition to digests, I can also generate fairly quickly the collected works for single authors for those who’d like a vanity collection of their own stories. There may be other types of collections that I’d like to handle as well.”

He has an example available here: http://www.box.net/shared/gx2nerq6tg

Let me (and him) know what you think about the idea and whatnot.

7 comments Posted 2011-05-11 Author: THX 0477

Comments

  • August Rode

    I’ve produced all of the monthly digests from the beginning of Ficly to the end of February 2011. They’re available at: http://www.box.net/shared/yg7eom74zq. I’ll try to get the next two posted shortly.

    It takes very little effort to generate these volumes now that the software to do so is largely complete. If you’d like a copy of your collected works, let me know.

    I’ve been looking at generating monthly best-of collections as well, consisting of featured stories and challenge winners. I’ve been convinced to put that off for a bit by the Powers That Be. Apparently some revisions to the story feeds are underway. Hopefully, those changes will include some information that will make the best-ofs easier to do.

    Anyway, please let me know what you think.

  • August Rode

    Caveat: I should point out that there is nothing in the story feed that indicates whether a story has mature content or not. (Web pages available from the Ficly web server have easy access to information that isn’t otherwise conveniently available.) As a result, each of the monthly digests contains everything for that month.

  • Robert Quick

    Awesome! Congratulations & thanks to the mighty August Rode! Perhaps even three cheers? I love this idea and I am glad that it is largely complete. Let the light of Ficly shine!

  • Sir Bic

    The idea of an e-book is wonderful! The look and feel of your production is fabulous! – The author of the example, however, leaves much to be desired. – []o)

    Thank you, Mr. Rode, for allowing me to be a beta-tester. I wish you well in your e-booking endeavors.

    For those who wish: Firefox provides a fine EPUB reader here – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/epubreader/

  • zxvasdf

    That would be great, especially to name and chronicle story arcs that have completed for easy access.

  • Stovohobo

    This is an awesome idea. I think it would definitely help me keep up with reading Ficly—I haven’t really been as diligent in the past few months.

  • someday_93

    It could be cool to do it for series work, too. Especially the longer ones.