website organization
nopejr's questions about story headers on his website reminded me that I have been thinking about personal archive organization lately. So, first a poll, and then my thoughts.
Poll
I don't think there's much argument against organizing stories by fandom - that's the obvious way to do it for a multifandom author. I have separate pages for each of my major fandoms, plus an "other fandoms" page for fandoms I have only a few stories in, as well as special crossover and audiofic pages which list only those types of stories. (The stories on the special pages also appear on the appropriate fandom page(s).)
Within each fandom, my stories are separated into two sections: stories, which are longer than 1000 words and archived on my website, and ficlets (which includes 100-word drabbles), which are posted elsewhere (usually lj) and have only links to them. Within these sections, they are organized by date, with the newest toward the top. I also give the month and year each story was posted, both in the index and on the actual story page. The reason I do it this way is to make it easy to find my newest stories - and conversely to make it easy to find my older stories, if someone has found my page from a newish story and wants to explore my other stuff.
A lot of authors list their stories alphabetically. This seems to me to make it easier to find a particular story (for example, if I remember the title of a story I really liked and want to read again), but harder to find stories I haven't read yet (for example, if I have discovered an author new to me and want to see her other stuff, I might end up glancing at a story I've read and back-buttoning as I try to find new-to-me stories). Flagging new stories helps somewhat, but it still doesn't help if the reader hasn't seen the page in a long time, or is looking for older unread stories rather than new ones. So I prefer organization by date - but I wonder whether everyone else disagrees and wishes I would change my website?
My HP stories are a special case, because 1) many people are very character-oriented or pairing-oriented in what they'll read in HP, and 2) I have a bazillion stories in a gazillion pairings. So I have rough divisions by pairing and character, and then within each of those divisions, a story/ficlet split, and then organization by date. However, now that I'm not writing HP any more, organization by date seems kind of silly, and I wonder whether I should go to alphabetical!
(SGA is also a very pairing-oriented fandom. But I don't have enough SGA stories to make it worthwhile to split things up by pairing, I think - it's easy to see what's what simply by scanning the page. I think. Ditto for due South.)
Back when I moved my recs to the eFiction-driven system, I considered changing my stories to that type of archive as well. I ended up deciding against it, partly because I didn't want to force everyone to change their links and partly because I didn't want to go through the work of recoding all my stuff. Also, I like being able to browse websites rather than searching them, and I think I have few enough stories that my current organization works just fine; by contrast, I have so many recs that the single-page system was getting unwieldy.
Any and all thoughts either on the organization of my website specifically, or on general principles for organizing fic sites, are welcome!
Poll
I don't think there's much argument against organizing stories by fandom - that's the obvious way to do it for a multifandom author. I have separate pages for each of my major fandoms, plus an "other fandoms" page for fandoms I have only a few stories in, as well as special crossover and audiofic pages which list only those types of stories. (The stories on the special pages also appear on the appropriate fandom page(s).)
Within each fandom, my stories are separated into two sections: stories, which are longer than 1000 words and archived on my website, and ficlets (which includes 100-word drabbles), which are posted elsewhere (usually lj) and have only links to them. Within these sections, they are organized by date, with the newest toward the top. I also give the month and year each story was posted, both in the index and on the actual story page. The reason I do it this way is to make it easy to find my newest stories - and conversely to make it easy to find my older stories, if someone has found my page from a newish story and wants to explore my other stuff.
A lot of authors list their stories alphabetically. This seems to me to make it easier to find a particular story (for example, if I remember the title of a story I really liked and want to read again), but harder to find stories I haven't read yet (for example, if I have discovered an author new to me and want to see her other stuff, I might end up glancing at a story I've read and back-buttoning as I try to find new-to-me stories). Flagging new stories helps somewhat, but it still doesn't help if the reader hasn't seen the page in a long time, or is looking for older unread stories rather than new ones. So I prefer organization by date - but I wonder whether everyone else disagrees and wishes I would change my website?
My HP stories are a special case, because 1) many people are very character-oriented or pairing-oriented in what they'll read in HP, and 2) I have a bazillion stories in a gazillion pairings. So I have rough divisions by pairing and character, and then within each of those divisions, a story/ficlet split, and then organization by date. However, now that I'm not writing HP any more, organization by date seems kind of silly, and I wonder whether I should go to alphabetical!
(SGA is also a very pairing-oriented fandom. But I don't have enough SGA stories to make it worthwhile to split things up by pairing, I think - it's easy to see what's what simply by scanning the page. I think. Ditto for due South.)
Back when I moved my recs to the eFiction-driven system, I considered changing my stories to that type of archive as well. I ended up deciding against it, partly because I didn't want to force everyone to change their links and partly because I didn't want to go through the work of recoding all my stuff. Also, I like being able to browse websites rather than searching them, and I think I have few enough stories that my current organization works just fine; by contrast, I have so many recs that the single-page system was getting unwieldy.
Any and all thoughts either on the organization of my website specifically, or on general principles for organizing fic sites, are welcome!