Random Thoughts

An update!

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 06:38:12 GMT

It's been exactly 4 months so I suppose I should post to say I'm still around! I just don't have a lot of free time right now.

Website
My website was down for a couple of days, so I'm sorry if that affected anyone! I have pondered switching to a static HTML site generator instead of what I'm currently using, which would avoid this happening again, but see above re: free time. (If I do, I will write a tutorial for how to do it, specifically to make your own fanfic archive so you can upload a work and it automatically adds it to whatever index pages you want and then upload it anywhere that supports plain static HTML... let me know if that's of interest to anyone.)

A couple of people have emailed me with bug reports and feature requests recently, so there have been some changes:

AO3 Statistics CSV Bookmarklet: Should now work properly with Unicode characters (e.g. Chinese, Japanese) and quotation marks in titles

AO3 Works List CSV Bookmarklet: Now includes the work's recipient (if available). I also reordered the columns so apologies if that's messed everything up for you.

Games
Theory of Magic (AKA Arcanum). A couple of years ago my brother linked me to this idle/clicker game where you work a wizard up through the ranks. I suddenly remembered it the other day, figured a game where you mostly just let it sit there and do its thing was perfect for my life right now, and have been playing for almost a week at this point. Documentation is very light so it's a "discover it as you go along" sort of thing - there's a new wiki with very little information, an old wiki with lots of info that's only available on web.archive.org, a Reddit that is mostly inactive (but at least not private) and a Discord I haven't joined. But I'm having fun!

Beastieball: This is a Kickstarter for a new game by the people behind Chicory and Wandersong, both of which I loved! It seems to be a Pokemon-like Volleyball RPG. It's fully funded but they are still working on stretch goals so check it out if that sounds fun to you!

Twitter
I finally quit Twitter - Tweetdeck going away was the final straw. Still figuring out how best to fill the idle-scrolling/refreshing void in my life. Maybe I need to pick up a game?

Reading
I picked up a copy of Witch King by Martha Wells but I haven't had the chance to read it yet. I recently reread Death of the Necromancer (which is getting an updated rerelease soon) and the Fall of Ile-Rien, which I still enjoyed. I also picked up the Murderbot audiobooks in a Humble Bundle (which has already ended, sorry) so I'm looking forward to listening to those someday.

Food
I got an Instant Pot after a deep anxiety spiral about trying to reduce the amount of cooking with gas I do. I've never used a pressure cooker OR a slow cooker before! If you are a multi-cooker user and have favourite (vegetarian) recipes, please send them my way!

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Bookmarklet: Show Spoilers

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 12:19:31 GMT

I don't think I posted about this here when I wrote it last year, but it helped me out today, so here goes:

Bookmarklet: Show Spoilers (Beta)

This will take whatever text you have highlighted and make the background colour white and the text colour black. I use it on my mobile browser to show spoilers where people have made the text and background the same colour.

(When I opened up the link to paste it in I reread my code and immediately felt the need to re-do it because it was hideous. Why am I like this!)

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AO3 to Pinboard Bookmarklet Updates

Fri, 27 Jul 2018 05:18:22 GMT

When I was doing my other script updates I remembered my AO3 to Pinboard bookmarklet, and wondered if anybody was still using it. Naturally I recently received a very lovely email with some feature suggestions, so I guess that's a yes!

So, it's been updated, and now includes the following options:
- Include the author's freeform (additional) tags in the pinboard tags
- Add the word count to the description
- Include view_adult=true in the bookmark URL where relevant
- Include view_full_work=true in the bookmark where relevant

The last two probably need a bit more testing before I'm happy with them.

I also took the opportunity to rework the code so that it's easier for me to maintain (and use my hacky bookmarklet configuring method), and to change the URL, because it was formerly at bookmarklet.html. Because it was the first one I created. Yikes.

This bookmarklet is now looking like decision fatigue personified, but one of the things I know about fandom's bookmarkers is that they all have their own complex cataloguing system, and I love to support that.

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New bookmarklets/userscripts: AO3 and Dreamwidth

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 23:01:21 GMT

I hadn't coded anything in a while... actually, that's not true. I coded a thing I hadn't posted here. So let's start with that instead.

AO3 Additional Filters
This is a userscript (and bookmarklet) to add author, date and wordcount filters to the sidebar on works listings. I basically wrote it because I was tired of losing my date filters when I changed the sort field.

And here's the one I was working on the last couple of days:

Dreamwidth HTML Buttons
This adds buttons to the beta Create Entries page that insert HTML for you.

Both of these are in beta and have only been tested in my own versions of Firefox and (briefly) in Chrome.

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Script: AO3 reading time estimate

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 11:23:04 GMT

After a certain friend of mine remarked that she'd been up until 3AM reading fic three nights in a row (a "fictim", as Tumblr would have it), I remarked that it should be pretty straightforward to write a script that will estimate how long it will take to read a fic and pop up a warning when it thinks you'll finish too late for comfort.

So there's now a bookmarklet that will calculate how long it will take you to read a fic, and also a userscript that will do the same and then warn you if it think you'll finish after 1AM (or however you configure it).

These are both still in very early beta, so please let me know if you encounter any weirdness or have suggestions.
http://random.fangirling.net/fun/ao3/work_reading_est.html

( I don't know if a point-by-point retrospective on developing this would be of any interest to anybody, so it's behind a cut. )

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Bookmarklet: AO3 Title Text Revealer

Fri, 06 May 2016 01:32:37 GMT

In some fandoms, it's reasonably common for fanfic authors to write text in a language other than English and provide a translation that appears on hover. They do this by putting the text in the title="" attribute of an HTML tag (usually <span>). This works on desktop, but on a touch screen device it gets a little complicated.

Initially I was thinking I could write some CSS in a custom AO3 theme to display the text after the element it's attached to, but it turns out that AO3 doesn't allow you to use the attr() function. So I went back to my old friend, the bookmarklet.

Reveal Title Text Bookmarklet

I also learned how to install bookmarklets on mobile Safari, which will probably greatly improve my fic reading experience in future. No way to install them on my Kobo though, so I guess I'll just have to deal with not being able to read the translations on my e-reader. That or add custom CSS to every AO3 epub I add to my Kobo.

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AO3 Tag ID Bookmarklet

Tue, 29 Dec 2015 06:46:42 GMT

Decided to write this bookmarklet during a discussion of advanced filtering in #yuletide, but had to leave before I finished it so it's no longer topical.

But I threw it up on my website anyway, so: bookmarklet to fetch AO3 tag ID

(Plans for next year: make my bookmarklet collection less hacked together.)

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AO3 stats spreadsheet bookmarklet

Mon, 28 Dec 2015 10:28:39 GMT

I decided to start compiling my "What I Wrote in 2015" post and instead ended up tweaking the bookmarklet I wrote to let you download your AO3 stats page as a CSV.

It now includes:
- Work subscriptions
- A link to the work
- Fandom for both views

Try it out, let me know how it goes - and if any JS coders out there have any recommended ways to provide file downloads of dynamically generated plaintext please let me know? (I've googled the topic, I'm hoping for personal experience.)

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Yuletiiiide

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 03:25:33 GMT

I'm back home and Yuletide signups are open, which means I've been frantically fixing bugs and tweaking my Yuletide Taglist filter. (Well, I suppose it's one way to combat jet lag...) Last year it was a separate page, but since I've been on a bookmarklet spree this year, I decided to make this one operate on the actual AO3 tag list.

random.fangirling.net/fun/yuletide/taglist_filter.html

Basically, it's for people like me who never quite know what they'll be requesting or offering until the final tag list goes up, and it lets you peruse the list and mark off the ones you're interested in, then slowly whittle it down.

As a bonus, it generates your bucket list for you!

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Flex Day #3 - AO3 Ebook Helper

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 02:34:52 GMT

I've been doing a lot of reading on my Kobo lately, so AO3's epub download feature is my favourite. In the shower this morning I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could just click a bookmarklet and it would queue up downloads of the epub versions of all stories in the series?

I encountered two problems with this:
1) For logical reasons, AO3's structure for the download URLs is a bit arcane. I had to grab a copy of the code from SVN and dig around until I figured out the format.
2) Prompting the browser to download multiple files is more difficult than you'd think (but, again, probably for logical reasons). I found a few solutions but they were all pretty dodgy.

Anyway, long story short, I sort of solved problem 1 but not problem 2.

http://random.fangirling.net/fun/ao3/downloader.html

This will provide download links for the ebook versions of all stories on an AO3 page (author's works, search, series, etc) in a little box that floats on the page after you click the bookmarklet.

It is undoubtedly very buggy.

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AO3 → Pinboard Bookmarklet

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 18:12:44 GMT

Not having a terribly productive flex day so far, but we're going to the bank in the afternoon so maybe it will be productive in the "organising our finances" sense?

I thought I'd link to something I posted on ao3some earlier this week, though:
http://random.fangirling.net/fun/ao3/bookmarklet.html
This generates a bookmarklet (little button that lives in your browser bookmarks) based on the Pinboard posting bookmarklet that will fetch tags from AO3 and put them in the tags box for you.

I wrote the bookmarklet on Sunday, the generator on Monday, added Author tagging on Wednesday (by request) and this morning I added a feature to remove the brackets from the end of the fandom tag (ie. turns 'The Avengers (2012)' into 'TheAvengers').

Additional feature requests welcome.

PS: I have investigated doing this for Tumblr without much luck, and for Delicious (which I might be able to do but it'll be less elegant). I could do Google Bookmarks if I thought anyone cared...

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