Fanfiction Recommendations

I've been trying to figure out a (relatively) painless method for posting my Delicious links to my journal that doesn't involve daily copy-pasting and fiddling with HTML. Delicious will auto-post links to certain blogging platforms, but not, sadly, to LJ-based journals. So, for the first time, I looked into Twitter. It's relatively easy to Tweet links from Delicious, and from there I can post to LJ and DWS. I will grant, though, that it's far from a perfect or elegant solution. My initial experimental post to Livejournal (via LoudTwitter) was not cut-tagged, the format wasn't the one I'd chosen, and the readability of the story information was less than ideal. I know, too, that the daily Twitter posts can be a subject of annoyance. But I think it might be the best way to do this, to post the links with a minimum of annoyance to those reading my journal. (And if it is annoying, please, please tell me. Really.)

The obvious question, I suppose, is why I'm going to all this trouble in the first place. The basic answer is that I seem to have gotten into the rec business via Delicious, and I would like to share those recs on Dreamwidth and Livejournal as well. The Twitter solution seems to be the best way to accomplish this, at least for now. (And if anyone has a nifty utility for posting Delicious links directly to Livejournal, please feel free to mention it. :))

All that said, if you are interested in following my (mostly) daily Torchwood recs on Twitter, my account name is dorothymarley. The Delicious links are the only things posted to that account, so don't follow it if you're interested in my cats, my knitting and/or my arthritis. :)

I should probably also mention that my definition of "rec" is fairly broad, at least for what I'm doing now in Torchwood fandom. The philosophy behind my recommendations is to tag the stories that I both enjoyed myself and that I feel other readers might enjoy as well, no more and no less. I gather stories by sorting through the daily posts of Torchwood fic (mostly via torchwood_three). I'm also slowly wading through the 2,000-story backlog in my Torchwood story folder and adding older stories, so chances are there will be a mix of old and new on any given day.

ETA: My apologies to any of my Livejournal friends who happened to be checking their friends-lists at around 3:30am CST. Yeah, those eight million LoudTwitter test posts freaked me out, too, considering that I sent one. I kept deleting them, and then thinking that LJ was messed up because no matter how many times I deleted the post was still there. Finally I realized that the buggers were multiplying, and that the timestamps were different. Seriously, I think it posted at least ten times.

ETA November 23, 2009: I've now stopped using the spoiler tag for "Children of Earth." All "Children of Earth" stories are now tagged with "episode:childrenofearth" and/or "torchwood:series3." You can find more information about the tags at this post.

Okay, I'm cheating, because this isn't an actual story list. Or rather, it's kind of an on-going story list.

What with the recent airing of "Children of Earth," the Torchwood fanfiction community has been--understandably--a bit overwhelmed with stories about the mini-series. In an effort to aid those readers who a) might not have seen "Children of Earth" yet or b) want to take a break from reading about "Children of Earth," I have (inspired by zortified) added a "nochildrenofearth" tag to my Delicious bookmarks.

http://delicious.com/dorothymarley/nochildrenofearth

These are stories which contain no spoilers about "Children of Earth," and do not take place during that time period of the series.

I've only tagged back as far as July 6th, the day "Children of Earth" began to air. If you want to read non-"Children of Earth" stories I bookmarked before then, just go to the main bookmark page and scroll/page until you get to July 5th. You're safe from there on back. :)

ETA: Playing the part of my brain, adina_atl has reminded me how easily the Bulk Edit function works (we won't mention that I used it to add the new tag to all the recent stories and then failed to think about the fact that it would work on all my tags at once, no really), and I've gone ahead and tagged all my bookmarks with "nochildrenofearth" as appropriate. That means that if you begin by using that tag and keep adding other tags to it (there's a list of + tags to the right when you get to the bookmark page), you will not encounter "Children of Earth" stories. Yes, it means that a huge majority of my bookmarks are tagged that way, but that's not really a problem and it does mean that readers can surf un-spoiled. I hope. :)

For those who do want to read more stories about "Children of Earth," I've tagged everything having to do with it with "spoilers:childrenofearth." I've also tagged most of the stories "torchwood:series3" and, where applicable, "torchwood:post-series3."

Also be aware that the "torchwood:post-series" tag--which covers stories that take place in the far-enough future to be unlikely to ever be covered by canon--may include "Children of Earth" spoilers even if there's not a specific Series 3 tag. In that case, there will be a "spoilers:childrenofearth" tag in place. As a final warning, be aware that some of the tags on "Children of Earth" stories may in themselves be spoilers.

(ETA September 6, 2009: It's been two months now since "Children of Earth" aired, and most communities have eased up on spoiler protection. I've thought about whether or not to stop using the spoiler tags, and have decided that, for now, I'll continue to use both the "nochildrenofearth" tag and the "spoilers:childrenofearth" tag for at least another month. It's very likely that I will eventually drop the "spoilers:childrenofearth" tag, but I may continue to use the "nochildrenofearth" one, simply because I can see where readers might want to filter those stories.)

I've opened a Delicious account. I did it out of sheer practicality, since I've gotten a second computer and suddenly needed to find a way to merge bookmarks without tearing my hair out. I've been hearing about Delicious (also, grateful that they changed the site address) for years but never took the time to figure out how it worked. I *still* don't know a lot about how the social aspect works, but the bookmark tagging is completely awesome and I've been experimenting with bookmarking and tagging the Torchwood stories I have saved.

So far, I've tagged around seventy stories, most of them recs. I've poked around enough to know a bit about the tagging conventions, but I'm wondering if I'm making egregious mistakes. My intent is to have my story bookmarks be functional to others as a search and rec list, so I'm a bit worried that I'm doing something weird that will make my bookmarks fall through the general tag-search cracks.

In fact, if those of you who use Delicious have a moment, I'd really appreciate some seasoned tagging/searching hands looking over my bookmarks and letting me know if I'm doing things that will confuse or annoy potential searchers. I'd rather find out now when I've got seventy stories to be fixed than after I've (potentially) tagged a thousand.

My goal is to, at least, tag the stories that I've flagged in my folders as being notable, and if I'm still crazy enough I'll try to tag the rest of my stories, too. But that's 1,500 in my Torchwood folder alone, so I'm not holding my breath. So, if you're interested, please feel free to subscribe to my tags. I'm focusing on getting older stories up right now, but I'm also trying to add notable new stories as they come along.