Forum: Author Hangout

How fast is your connection? I am lucky if I get 6Mbs where I live so it would probably take a lot longer.

Surprisingly, the only thing they can right in Indonesia is high-tech. My connection is 256 Mbs.
Good luck. :-)

Although I don't know for sure, as a basic member myself I'd say NO as that's a significant value-added service to persuade people to take up premier membership.

The only way I can see to do what you want as a basic member is to write some scripts/programs to interrogate the site and look for changes to the author listing(s) - the site does not provide the 'last changed date' HTTP headers so you can't use them, you have to examine the page content, and examine the author pages rather than the story pages so you don't consume a download when looking for a change. Alternatively have a script run daily to examine the Updates pages for a mention of any stories of interest (daily rather than every-other-day as the list can grow to >50 items), or a script to examine the home page for mention (this would need running more than once per day). The only ray of light is that a simple text search of the raw HTML for https://storiesonline.net/s/{ID of story} will find mentions, and if you have a list of story IDs (a 5 digit number at present) you can loop searching for each ID in turn on a single saved copy of the HTML. Story IDs don't change, but deleted stories IDs are re-used now (that didn't used to be the case)

I keep a browser window open with a copy of the home page displayed, and search for a date-time stamp copied from near the top then reload it and search again, preferably in the morning and evening. This lets me look at just the entries since I last looked, and if I left it too long so I missed some I can check the Updates and New Stories pages between the time I searched for and the last time on the new homepage {ETA: giving an effect similar to the homepage shading for premier members}. All the above works without needing to be logged in, which means you can keep that very large can of worms tightly sealed.

I don't know for sure, as a basic member myself I'd say NO

Thanks for that. I understand the site must make some premier-member-only features attractive enough so people will pay for them.

Thanks too, for your effort to provide all that extra technical advice. Please forgive me! I tried to read it, but my eyes glazed over, and I think I lost consciousness for a while too.

I have a new WIP which I think has potential. I would never dream posting as I wrote, but with this story I could get the opening chapter or two up to standard before finishing my first draft of the rest. I would like to post them soon, as a teaser, but also make a blog post explaining why it will be a long time before I begin posting the rest of the story.

I was hoping to add instructions for how readers could request the system to advise them once I begin posting the rest. I think the instructions will have to be:
* premier members already have that capacity using their My Library feature
* others may send me an email now with just the word 'Like', or their email address. I'll make sure I contact them personally once I start posting. My preference, if they don't need anonymity, is to collect email addresses for one bulk mail-out in the future.

Ah, I was solving the wrong problem. What I use in this scenario is a normal browser bookmark to a sorted search for the story title and author and tagged with the latest update date I've read, something like this (pretty much copied from my browser bookmarks):

Homebodies by Al Steiner 2017-09-17


Clicking on the link/bookmark brings up the search results page with the latest update date, which can be compared against the date in the bookmark name to see if there are any new postings to view.

ETA: if you build a link like that and put it in your blog, readers can right-click the link and save-link-to-bookmarks to save the text and URL together. However, you have to manually build the link by modifying the URL of the search results to add the '&author=' clause.

AND @ madnige

Thanks, both, but I will not suggest to readers they do anything more than a few simple steps to create a set-and-forget solution.
I think the best I can do is promise if they send me an email now, I will make the effort to contact them whenever - if ever :( - I finish writing and start posting the whole story.

Why not just use the RSS feeds. It's in XML format so you can phrase any thing you want to watch for. i sure there are even programs that can check and track rss feeds for strings to watch for.

Thanks. I'm curious to learn what RSS feeds are.

I doubt it will help me with my little problem. The suggestions made here so far all seem to be solutions for a slightly different type of problem.

I want to post one or two chapters from my WIP soon, as a teaser. I will not post any more for many months or years, until after the entire story is ready to go. I want to make a blog post explaining that it will be a long time before any more of the incomplete story is posted.

Ideally, I would like readers who enjoyed my teaser to know how they can do a few, simple steps now to create something that will alert them when I start posting the entire story. If I suggest anything it must be some set-and-forget action they can do now. This will not be a problem for premier members. They'll already know better than me how to use their My Library feature to achieve that.

The only thing I can think of for non-premier members is to offer that if they send me a message with the word 'Like' or their email address, I will make the effort, once I am ready to resume posting, to contact them personally with an alert.

* * *

Whether they will solve this particular problem or not, I am curious. What do RSS feeds do? Where are they? How do I use them to set up reminders to myself? ...

Thanks in advance, Ross.