Tikatu's Travels Through Time

Been working on coding things for my personal fiction site. I’ve finished and posted Mosaic – though that will be updated when the muse strikes – and I’m working on The White Winds. There’s still lots to do, but I’m almost halfway through the chapter formatting. I’ve managed to get it down to a routine. Open the .txt files, put in the chapter coding snippet for each chapter. Scroll down and add the back and forward buttons snippet. Tweak them to the proper chapter numbers. Remove the “next time, next chapter” stuff and paste it in a .txt file. Scroll up; add new title and cut the teasers and disclaimer. Then save as a .shtml file. Leave them all open, find a scene divider and change it with the short horizontal line snippet. Copy that, and do a global replace on all open files. Do a preview skim to make sure things look right, then save and close all. Really, I just did about 15 chapters and it only took an hour or so.

Seriously, the biggest time eater is finding images for the splash pages and writing the foreword. On Mosaic, it took me beyond forever to figure out which screencaps to use (and I found I’d duplicated some from earlier stories), and then the free photos that spoke to the drabbles. For The White Winds, I’ve asked my daughter to update a piece of cast art that she’d done for me earlier. Her artwork has progressed soooo very far that she was embarrassed by the old stuff. Since I’m working so quickly on coding this, I should poke her about that piece.

I’m also trying to decide if I should add my two non-Thunderbirds one-shots to the One Shots book. I’ve done one for The Incredibles, and one for Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. My fanfiction is so heavily Thunderbirds-oriented, but these deserve a home, too. (They are posted on ff.net and on FanNation.) Tell me what you think about that.

In other writing news, I’ve pulled most of my work from Lunaescence Archives. I have several reasons for this. Things that were broken aren’t being fixed is one of them (thinking of forum registration here), but an increasing dissatisfaction with the way the archive is being run, and the ever-stronger skew toward anime and manga (and reader-insert) stories are probably stronger reasons. I’m sad about this, really; so many archives tend to go downhill once their owners are no longer involved in running and upgrading them. And now this has happened (IMHO) to Luna. (Yes, this puts me in mind of Thunderbirds Central, and parts of IR:TNP that need updating, too.)

As far as my personal “cyberstalker” (Lillehafrue’s term) is concerned, I haven’t heard from her again. Hopefully, I never will.

Back to the HTML editor, Batman!

That's the title of the warning posts that I've been spreading around the fandom this morning as I got the news that Lycos Europe is shutting down both their email and their Tripod webhosting services next month. For some fandoms, this being a European thing isn't all bad; the US isn't affected (yet) and most of the active sites on Tripod (if there are any) would be on the US servers. However, for my fandom, this isn't good. The UK is where the widest fan base is, and I know there are still sites on Tripod. Tripod has been around a long while, and some fans moved on to other places - like MSN groups, which is also closing down next month.

Adding in the AOL Groups closure last year, I get the distinct impression that the fannish world is shrinking. Like being on an ice floe and all the edges are falling off, floating and melting away into the surrounding ocean, leaving less and less space to stand on. Many of the webmasters/groups owners have moved on in fandom; some have dropped out entirely. Now the information, pictures, discussions and fanfiction stored on these remaining sites, abandoned or not, will drop out as well.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? In a way, yes. A lot of unique material is going to be lost forever. I went hunting through Tripod's search engine, looking for sites specific to my fandom. None were terribly active, but one had some fanfiction that I've seen nowhere else, and another had some unique computer generated art. Will these be saved by their creators? Will they be posted elsewhere? At this point, I doubt it. How much more of this is tucked away in abandoned Yahoo groups, or Angelfire sites, or Geocities sites? What happens if these are shut down, too, as being "unprofitable" or not "best of breed"? In the greater scheme of things, I suppose they're not much of a loss. Fandom, as important as it is to some now, won't necessarily be important to the same people later. But even in closed canon fandoms, such as my own, there are still fans that come along, all fired up by their new shiny, and it's good to see where others have been before. It's good to know what the clichés were, who the BNFs were, where to find the fanworks that aren't in the mainstream, or where that plagiarist might have found the work s/he is stealing. Those unique contributions are lost, and it stings.

That's what's got me so determined not to let my own MSN Groups go quietly. I've spent the past couple of days copying all the custom pages and downloading any pictures that I don't have on my own hard drive. I hope to use them in building a new site elsewhere... but will that one day go the way these others have gone? I guess only time will tell.