Subscriptions!

[swan_tower]

An Archive of Our Own has, after much anticipation, reached a point where they can implement subscriptions. This means that AO3 users can set their accounts up to be notified when a writer they like posts a new story. (I have no idea if I'm likely to post anything before next Yuletide, but the nice thing about subscriptions is it's no big deal if I don't; you just won't get notifications. I'm russian_blue, if you care.)

I'll have to see how this particular implementation of the idea works out in practice, but man, I still want something like it for pro fiction. Obviously it's harder in some ways to implement -- the AO3 is a single database; a short story subscription manager would have to scrape updates from a bunch of different online magazines -- but if there was a central service I could use to be alerted when short story authors I like publish something new, something along the lines of an RSS reader, I would sign up so fast my keyboard would be smoking.

But I wouldn't know where to begin in coding something like that. So I sit here and make begging eyes, and hope that if I mention it enough times, the idea will spread until it lands in the brain of somebody who can do it.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I'm a big fan of that site, though I'm not a member (I used to writer Hong Kong film fanfic, about obscure films, and most of it on a PCW, in the late, lamented LocoScript).

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

They seem to have been doing a pretty intelligent job of building the site up, adding functionality, etc.

[xahra99.livejournal.com]

Wow! Didn't know you wrote fanfiction. Have subscribed. Just signed up to AO3 and loving the features-the site seems to go out of its way to make itself easy to use, especially with all the livejournal fail recently. There's a lot of good fic on there and the quality so far seems pretty high.I think my favourite story on there is the Tale of Genji/Pillow Book crossover where Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon team up to fight crime and criticize perfume choices.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I don't write it much; I just signed up for Yuletide last year, and may occasionally poke at it more, since fanfiction is pure play (instead of work). But yeah, AO3 seems like a pretty well-designed site.