newcomers | Guest Lecture - On Fiction Organisation

Hi, I'm Miz.

You might remember me from such sites as Cohost, or uh... Cohost (RIP 😿), and I've been invited here today to talk to you about... Organizing Your Dreamwidth Serial Fiction¹, Because Tags Aren't Enough And They're Displayed In The Wrong Order To Boot.

If you ever read any of Cohost Writers' Salon most prolific writer Caffeinated Otter²'s longer works, you might remember the beautiful little navigation header and footer boxes that contained useful links related to that story.

When I started to repost my archive on here, I decided to do the old "copy the homework, but change it a bit", and created my own, slightly uglier looking version.

Below you will find the bit of html/css³ that makes it look⁴ like my header in the post above.

<div style="border-radius: 50%/10%; border: 2px solid; display: flex; align-items: center; flex-direction: column; font-size: 90%;">
<center>SERIES TITLE GOES HERE</center>
<div style="width: 90%; display: flex; justify-content: space-around;">
<span><a href="BEGINNING LINK GOES HERE" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" tabindex="0">beginning</a></span>
<span><a href="PREVIOUS LINK GOES HERE" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" tabindex="0">previous</a></span>
<span><a href="NEXT LINK GOES HERE" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" tabindex="0">next</a></span>
</div>
</div>

Going back and forth fixing up next/previous links each time you add a new chapter is some degree of More Hoops™, but I do think it makes things nicer and easier for your readers, and they're who we're doing this for, right?

Anyway, I hope this'll be of some use to you.
^{^{^{maybe read my stories, please and thank you}}}

^1: Or other things you want to help people track on here in a sequential order
^2: Who is also on here with recent work
^3: Which you can post straight into the markdown editor as well, with no problems
^4: I would really suggest fiddling with it further so it's less... wonky

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This is super useful. I have linked it in the Dreamwidth Code section of the "Cohost Is Closing" resource page.

No worries, glad it's useful.
_{_{Sorry for being... well, me all over the post}}

You did a great job. Be proud of yourself. "You" is nothing to apologize for. Especially not here.

I love the simplicity of this — thank you for sharing it! I don't typically write serial fiction, but I think it can still be useful for serial nonfiction as well (and is super helpful as a starting point for fiddling-around-with.)

Yeah, my series tend to be long and complicated, where things get dropped into the middle. But I also do sets of nonfiction articles sometimes, and it would be really useful for that. Maybe also for shorter and less complicated series.

Not related specifically to the topic of the post, but a suggestion: If you want to share code snippets, you can use the < textarea ></ textarea > HTML to contain the code snippet in a neat box. (Just remove the spaces.) It's a space saver, especially if what you're sharing is a bit long.

The snippet you shared in your post would look like this:

<div style="border-radius: 50%/10%; border: 2px solid; display: flex; align-items: center; flex-direction: column; font-size: 90%;"> <center>SERIES TITLE GOES HERE</center></p> <div style="width: 90%; display: flex; justify-content: space-around;"> <span><a href="BEGINNING LINK GOES HERE" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" tabindex="0">beginning</a></span> <span><a href="PREVIOUS LINK GOES HERE" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" tabindex="0">previous</a></span> <span><a href="NEXT LINK GOES HERE" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" tabindex="0">next</a></span> </div> <p></div>

Thank you for sharing this guide!
I just started using it for my drabble series. :)

I'm glad people are finding tools they want to use.

Good luck with your series. Drabbles are very popular on Dreamwidth.

Thank you for this! We'll use this if we ever get our act together & write the series we want to write

I'm glad that folks are finding useful things here. I wish you luck with your series; that's a worthwhile project to tackle.

Guest Lecture - On Fiction Organisation

Thank you!

Re: Thank you!

Re: Thank you!

Ooh! Interesting!

Re: Ooh! Interesting!

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Yay!

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Yes ...