Forum: Story Recommendations

copy and paste :)

https://www.wikihow.com/Save-a-Webpage

https://www.wikihow.com/Save-a-Webpage

Sorry, The provided solution for PCs 'Control+S' does not work with SOL story pages. SOL provides only part of the chapter with a message:"There is more of this chapter... To read the complete story you need to be logged in:"

At least with Edge this works:
1) place the cursor over the link
2) right-click
3) select "save link as" (Sorry, re-translated from German "Link speichern unter")
This saves the chapter without any images, those you have to save separately: Place the cursor over the image, right click and save the picture.

HTH,

HM.

Sorry, The provided solution for PCs 'Control+S' does not work with SOL story pages.

Works just fine for me, always has. Linux and Firefox, logged in of course, save as html, easy-peasy.

Works just fine for me, always has. Linux and Firefox, logged in of course, save as html, easy-peasy.

But did you check the stored file if it's complete? (see my answer to Keet).

HM.

p.s. I've standard access, not premium and I stay logged in, never sign out.

But did you check the stored file if it's complete?

Yes, of course.

The only time I see the 'preview' page is if I click on the next chapter link at the bottom of the saved page - which makes sense, since each page is saved as it's own file. I imagine that link leads to a logged-out preview on SOL's site, rather than the next page I have saved (I have standard membership and log in and out as needed). I just have to load each saved file individually to read the whole story.

I used to do the copy-paste thing but it's more work for no gain, and when I saved as txt file I got all the header code too, which was messy.

SOL provides only part of the chapter with a message:"There is more of this chapter... To read the complete story you need to be logged in:"

That says that you are trying to save the page without being logged in. Just log in first and you can save the complete page.

SOL provides only part of the chapter with a message:"There is more of this chapter... To read the complete story you need to be logged in:"

T

hat says that you are trying to save the page without being logged in. Just log in first and you can save the complete page.

Huh?
I think I'm logged in. The Home page shows my log-in name
and how many stories I've accessed [2/100].
The links on the right top of the Home page are:
My Account Sign Out Mail Contact Help
When the link reads 'Sign Out' I am logged in, am I?

I can access any story chapter and it's displayed entirely.
I can download a chapter if I hoover the cursor over any of the links provided and from the right-click menu select 'save link as'.
But if I just right-click into the displayed page and then save the page as HTML (or use Control+S) it only seems to save the entire page. When I open the saved file to read it offline it contains the message:"There is more of this chapter... To read the complete story you need to be logged in:".

Can anyone enlighten me?

HM.

I can access any story chapter and it's displayed entirely.
I can download a chapter if I hoover the cursor over any of the links provided and from the right-click menu select 'save link as'.
But if I just right-click into the displayed page and then save the page as HTML (or use Control+S) it only seems to save the entire page. When I open the saved file to read it offline it contains the message:"There is more of this chapter... To read the complete story you need to be logged in:".

Can anyone enlighten me?

The only thing I can think of is that you try to download from a different page then where you are logged in. The message 'There is more...' should only appear if you are not logged in. Maybe a non-premium member sees it when trying to access a chapter of a premium story, I don't remember if it works that way or if is has changed. The thing is, if you see the full page in your browser than what you see is already downloaded otherwise the browser can not show it. A save-page-as on a right click saves what is shown on that page (WYSIWYG), it shouldn't download again.
Now here's the fun part: you can choose to download (save-as) the html only or the full page. If you save the full page even images are saved. The result after saving is a html page and a directory with the same name that contains the css, images, etc. At least that's how it works with Firefox and I must assume other browsers work the same. If Edge doesn't work try another browser, but it shouldn't make a difference. Right click the saved page and open it in your browser, it should show the same page as if accessed from SOL.

If Edge doesn't work try another browser, but it shouldn't make a difference

I originally used Opera on my old laptop and it worked for years, then suddenly it made problems, so I switched to Edge and it worked when I used the link to download the page. On my new laptop I didn't install Opera and only use Edge.

HM.

How big is the saved file? It sounds as if it's saving a shortcut instead of the actual page.

You are using a newish Windows 10 laptop? Try printing the page to the Microsoft PDF Printer driver. This will "print" the page to a PDF file.

Now here's the fun part: you can choose to download (save-as) the html only or the full page. If you save the full page even images are saved. The result after saving is a html page and a directory with the same name that contains the css, images, etc.

I tried all three offered selections and then checked the resulting files with Editor to see all the html codes too.

When I select 'html only' I get the shortened preview ("there is more...") version saved (as .html).

Saving the full page the .html file contains all of the chapter. Same with 'web page, single file' (as .mhtml).

BTW, I tried Dominions Son's suggestion "Microsoft Print to PDF" and the print preview showed the full chapter.

HM.

When I select 'html only' I get the shortened preview ("there is more...") version saved (as .html).

Saving the full page the .html file contains all of the chapter. Same with 'web page, single file' (as .mhtml).

BTW, I tried Dominions Son's suggestion "Microsoft Print to PDF" and the print preview showed the full chapter.

The difference between html only and full page seems like a convoluted mess in Edge, I can't begin to think of what may cause the difference.
BTW, don't save pdf's. If you want to create a full story when you have gathered all chapters that is very easy with html, not so much with pdf's. The same reason why you don't want .mhtml, it's a lot more difficult to aggregate into a story when you have to split the MIME parts in the mhtml.

The difference between html only and full page seems like a convoluted mess in Edge, I can't begin to think of what may cause the difference.

I now used my older laptop (where I have both Edge and Opera) and it's exactly the same problem with both browsers!
I would have guessed right-clicking on the link of the chapter and selecting 'store linked content...' could cause a file which contains the preview with the message "there is more...", while right-clicking into the displayed – complete – chapter would create a file with the full chapter. But it is the other way round!

Now who is the culprit?
# Microsoft Windows 10?
# The browsers Opera and Edge? (only if they share the relevant code).
# SOL?
# Some obscure settings on my laptop? (but it's the same problem with both)
# McAfee? (but the problem already existed when I installed McAfee)
# Anything else?

HM.

Do you possibly have some download helper software installed? I recall that there was some that I used long ago which could be set to automatically capture the save operation and perform it outside of IE/Firefox (and others) to give a better download experience than through the browser (auto recover from broken downloads, multiple download threads to speed things up etc). That software would cope with extracting the logon info from the browser for the same site, but with the SOL/FS/SFS logon being through a different domain (WLPC) it probably couldn't cope.

ETA: I used to use FreeDownloadManager under Windows, where I could select one or many chapter links to be downloaded, but this left me to manually save (or select for saving) pictures and second pages (this was back when large chapters were split into ~50kB pages), and manually fix up inter-chapter links and merge multiple pages; IIRC FDM would not be able to cope with the WLPC login. Now I use a custom script which mostly automates all that at much the same level of effort as the premier download buttons.

ETA2: It's ironic that my preferred method of posting links to stories here, posting a link to the advanced search page to give the description rather than direct to the story, is not directly compatible with my download mechanism, which involves dragging a link to the story from the browser and dropping it on a custom script; I'd have to open the search page and drag the link from there.

ETA2: It's ironic that my preferred method of posting links to stories here, posting a link to the advanced search page to give the description rather than direct to the story, is not directly compatible with my download mechanism

If you post a link to the 'more info' page for the story, readers can see the story info and links to each chapter - along with info as to when chapters were last updated. And this does not count towards a reader's daily download limit. It also does not increase the download count of the story, unless of course the reader follows one of those chapter links!

(It would be nice if the site automatically converted links to stories within posts to links to the stories' "more info" pages.)

The advantage to posting a link to the advanced search pages rather than the [More Info] link is that, since story IDs are reused, then after a story deletion and reuse of the ID, a [More Info] link will point to an incorrect story, whereas the links to the story and to the advanced search page will show an error page instead. The Advanced search page will not use up a download either (like with [More Info]), but needs a little care to craft properly. Having generated the search and got the results you want to post a link to, you need to copy the link not from the address bar, but from one of the column headings - the address bar would give you an empty search with all 49k+ stories. AFAIK these are the only routes to getting a link to the story description; all the other places on site which give a story description (main page, quick search more info, and in-story story details) do not have pasteable links - the latter two are javascript, and do not even carry links to the story.

The advantage to posting a link to the advanced search pages rather than the [More Info] link is that, since story IDs are reused, then after a story deletion and reuse of the ID, a [More Info] link will point to an incorrect story,

Ugh! Sorry, but that's a weird design decision. Having story ids being all-time unique seems much more sensible.

Ugh! Sorry, but that's a weird design decision. Having story ids being all-time unique seems much more sensible.

I too would never reuse unique id numbers but Lazeez probably has good reasons for the reuse. Maybe historical from the time when disk space and database size still played a factor in the total costs of hosting.

Yes, it's called OCD ;)

I would think OCD would prevent reuse ;)

Of course if you link to the index page for a multi chapter story or to any one chapter, or to the story rather than the more info page, the link includes the story title, so no confusion over re-used Ids. Another option I've seen a lot is a link to the author page.

I've deduced that nowadays the unique key is the combination of story ID and story name. Go back far enough and there wasn't a database - it was a manually maintained flat file system, then in 1999 the database was introduced with the 5-digit story IDs being the unique identifier, starting at 30000 for the files transferred from the flat file system, and as best I can deduce, 32768 for new submissions. A lot of the site facilities seem to have been written back then, with the assumption that story IDs were unique. Because of the use of story IDs, deleted stories left holes in the numbering, and this apparently caused increasing inefficiencies in the site database accesses, so the present system was introduced along with resetting new story IDs from 77000 to 10000 for new submissions - Lazeez stated this change was for database efficiency reasons. Thus we've presently got three bands of story IDs:

10000 -> 25748 and counting, the stories posted since the database change in July 2014

30000-30096, the stories transferred from the flat file system (Laz has stated that the first story transferred was the Parthenogenesis story at ID 30000), there may have been a few more posted that have since been deleted.

32768 -> 77000, the stories added under the old database with (at present) unique story IDs and holes in the numbering, from July 1999 to July 2014.

From the holes in the numbering 30k+, we can see that nearly a half of all stories posted are deleted (49327 stories total - 25749 recent stories = 23579 older stories of 96+(77000-32767) = 44329 posted, for just under 47% deleted). These holes will be filled in as the number of stories on the site grows to overlap the holes.

In principle I can agree that ID reuse is a bad idea, but I can see that there may have been design decisions made which mean it's either reuse, or a major rewrite for longer IDs (which would have had to happen by about 2020 under the old system). Of course, the reuse is only a temporary solution to avoid longer IDs, but the present system should be OK for another 15 years, plenty of time to fix up the code, or maybe far enough in the future that Lazeez will have no interest anymore.

ETA: To find what story is associated with a particular ID, grab any [More Info] link and edit the ID at the end of the URL to the one you want details on. The [More Info] links are mostly found on premier pages, but for basic members the links may be found in the RSS feeds.

In principle I can agree that ID reuse is a bad idea, but I can see that there may have been design decisions made which mean it's either reuse, or a major rewrite for longer IDs (which would have had to happen by about 2020 under the old system).

Ok, I'm not a database administrator but as a developer I necessarily know quite a lot about it.
Id's are just a unique identifier, in this case a number. It's sole purpose is to have a unique identifier for a record in a table in a database, usually an auto increment number. In modern database design the unique identifier isn't even used as a key to relate to other records, there should be a different identifier for that. Of course that's now. In the past disk space and table size played a major role in designs. It's what caused the Y2K problems because storing 2 digits for a year took less space then 4.
I can make an educated guess about the 5 digit number: a MySQL unsigned smallint has a maximum of 65535 and takes 2 bytes for storage. Adding a 6th digit requires a mediumint data type which can go up to unsigned 16777215 but requires 3 bytes for storage. Nowadays that difference is nothing but there was a time where is was. On the other hand, if the database was introduced in 1999, smallint or mediumint didn't make a huge difference at that time but the usage of id's as keys was still very common, many still do. It can't be to reuse the occupied space because almost every database has ways to free up space from deleted records and let's face it: for a database (i.e. MySQL/MariaDB) 100000 records is peanuts, it can handle many millions without problems. It's also peanuts to change the data type of a smallint field to int. The full database design for SOL might be complex but the number of records is tiny compared to other systems. To me re-usage doesn't make sense.

Nowadays that difference is nothing but there was a time where is was.

I once spent most of a week recoding some PIC code to free up a single byte of RAM; it wasn't just the folding of a 2-bit state vector (occupying one byte) into the spare bits of a 5-bit state vector (occupying another), but also shuffling and squeezing code so that none of the four 2K-word program memory pages got too large with the necessary added code (including the code which actually used that byte). And that's not even the smallest memory processor I've coded for!

And that's not even the smallest memory processor I've coded for!

Ah, those were the days.
I remember from my Cobol days that we had to create code that when compiled was a maximum of x Kb in size and memory usage couldn't exceed x Kb. I learned what code constructions were optimal very fast :D

code that when compiled was a maximum of x Kb in size and memory usage couldn't exceed x Kb

Luxury! measuring memory in KB (I assume you meant Kbytes not Kbits). Try an Intel MCS 8048, a whopping 1kilobyte of code and 64 bytes RAM (BYTES, not kbytes) - and that included the registers and stack, so really you were down to 32 bytes. That's this much: [0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUV]. My first project on that was rewriting the boss' code, which was about 6X oversize, for a bit of kit that had a keyboard (had to scan the keyboard switches myself) and a 1-line LCD.

the server started for some reason at 30,000 and then jumped unexpectedly from 30096 to 327xx.

...so my last two ranges above are actually folded into one. The next ID in use after 30096 is 32768, which is 2^15 and very suggestive.

the holes in ID number between 32700 and 77000 are also unpredictable. Some are due to deletions but many aren't.

...so my analysis of the rate of deletion is wrong, and also the projected overflow time of the current system, but the projected overflow time of the old system would be correct (but more uncertain)

I hated the unpredictability hence the current system.

I'm not OCD (well, not much) but I'd hate that too. In fact I do hate it, even though it's no longer in use as it's made statistical analysis and extraction of data from the storylists difficult-to-impossible.

Now who is the culprit?
# Microsoft Windows 10?
...
# Anything else?

It might be a combination windows10 and what madnige said: a download helper. I wouldn't be surprised if windows10 forces an internal download helper to take over from the browser "for a better experience", implemented like crap, as the default for MS seems to be.
I have never encountered the problem on any of my Linux boxes. I remain of the opinion that if you have the chapter fully on your screen that it *should* make no difference because it already is downloaded, it just needs to be copied from your cache/tmp to an html file, which is what the browser does with the save-as function.

It might be a combination windows10 and what madnige said: a download helper. I wouldn't be surprised if windows10 forces an internal download helper to take over from the browser "for a better experience", implemented like crap, as the default for MS seems to be.

As I already wrote, I never had problems with Opera (my old downloaded HTML files are ok) until I tried to convert a then recently downloaded story into an epub and found all chapters were truncated with this "there is more...".
Checking other downloaded files I found – starting with one day nearly 3 month earlier – all downloads were incomplete!
I then tried another approach and I got the download progress and when complete the file was automatically removed! So I finally tried Edge and while it had the same problems with saving the displayed chapter it could download it using "store link as" which saved the content of the link to my drive.
So it now looks like Win10 messed up after an update.
Until today I no longer used Opera for downloading SOL chapters. During today's test download I expected the automatic remove of the downloaded HTML file, but this didn't happen, probably because further updates addressed this bug.

HM.

BTW, back then, about 30 years ago, I used a download helper on one of my PCs for downloading larger files via ftp over an expensive but slow dial-up line.
In the last 20 years I've never even tried such a program on any of my PCs.

So it now looks like Win10 messed up after an update.

Looks like it, although I think browser updates, not win itself. Not that it's clear to the average user what windows updates contain at all.

In the last 20 years I've never even tried such a program on any of my PCs.

What I was referring to was that possibly win10 hijacks the browsers save-as and then uses an internal download manager instead. For Edge they can legitimately do this but not for other browsers.

possibly win10 hijacks the browsers save-as and then uses an internal download manager instead

I understood this and in my remark I addressed madnige's idea of a dedicated download helper.

HM.

Can anyone enlighten me?

Copying the text as recommended copies the html that has been generated. If pasted somewhere, when revisited you see 5he same thing.

I think "save link"copies the instructions used to generate the HTML - so in this case invokes macros that check whether you are looged on at the time you revisit what has been saved.

I dunno how long that will last given my age.

Don't buy green bananas?

In the US, dieticians are licensed, but anyone can claim to be a nutritionist. It's an easy way to spot the quacks.