As much as I liked and preferred the new layout for story lists, it was growing more and more obvious that I was in a minority.

As the number of complaints started to exceed the number of compliments, I decided to revert the code.

As well as a vast swathe of bug fixes, there are three more interesting things that might be of interest.

1) A new site config option to replace the light blue with the standard site dark blue

2) The expand-list check box, that replaces expands the story lists to something more resembling the old layout

3) For those with an attachment to the old grid layout - http://www.fanficauthors.net/old/ has it

So, finally, a few months later than expected, we have the long-promised code updates.

While every effort has been made to bug test this, there are probably some still floating around.  Alas, I don't have the resources I do at work to run full tests for all browsers.

The new site is very javascript heavy, but has worked fine on a 7 yr old computer (running Chrome), so it should be fast enough for everyone.  So, what's changed?

• Login with Facebook/Google.  If nothing else, this stops people from needing emails that are (currently) dodgy.  I don't store any of these details, I just match your email address with one in the site.  If no match is found, then it offers you a chance to either create a new account, or reclaim your original account.
• Improved story lists - you can now filter, or even do a basic search for stories.  I'd have liked to put in a full text search as well, but don't have the server resources to do so.
• Improved story uploading for Site owners - Finally switched to a DOM based parsing system (From the regex based one) that appears to be a LOT more robust
• Changed the translation system to be far more comprehensive.
• Complete visual refresh 
• Improved Font Size/Style, CSS and page width settings.  These are now available on all story pages
• Updated the user pages (to see all a users reviews) to be more useful
• FINALLY - fixed the problem with .mobi files, and Kindles.  New versions are being uploaded at the moment.
• Allowed better html customisation on reviews/comments
• Fixed the bugs showing chapters (On mine) before they were officially released.  This has been a long standing bug, that was discovered in December.  When I found the bugs, I delayed the release of the stories until i could fix it, but finding this meant re-tooling parts of the site, that just delayed everything.  I will be releasing the chapters "officially" for the few who didn't find them before hand shortly.

There are more, but I can't think of them right now.  What started as a quick hack to integrate Facebook/Google quickly grew out of control, and a lot of ideas were tried, then removed.

As always, IE support lags behind Chrome/Firefox/Safari - however, it looks like IE10 will support the URL pushState objects, bringing them into line with the other major browsers.  I've also dropped support from IE7, 8 is acceptable, just - but if you are stuck on Windows XP, it would be better to use a more up to date browser, if only for stability and security.

If you do find anything wrong/weird - please contact me.

Seems very weird to post stories with the last HP movie out.  And having just come back from seeing it, I thought I'd feel something.  The movie itself did drag me in, despite the many plot holes and things you'd only know if you'd read the books - which was obvious from the quesitons my non HP reading wife was asking.  It was only on the car ride home, talking about it, that my more rational mind kicked in.  I did think it was the best of the eight movies.

The main impression I left with, was that some of the imagination on show drawfs mine by a such a huge distance that I can't even see it.  So here's to fanfiction, the art of playing in a world someone else's imagination created, and looking at it from different angles.

Oh, and that Neville Longbottom?  What a guy! 

As most have gathered, my life tends to be a steady lurching from one crisis to another. Which would be fine if caused by us, but a bit wearing when it's mostly external.

Regardless, no one cares (not even me).

Anyway, after finally swallowing my pride and asking for help, Kinsfire has gracefully stepped forward and agreed to handle the recruiting side of ffa.net. He is completely in charge of who gets new author accounts and who doesn't. I'm very grateful to him for stepping up and doing this, as my other option was accepting that the site was going to slowly die.

The first person we'd like to welcome is Seel'vor, who is a very welcome addition.  

<--#include standard irrelevant excuse for not updating recently. -->

TL;DR version: English stories only here and Phoenixsong.net.  Translations anywhere (with my permission). Do NOT copy my stories.

JBern's new book Spirals of Destiny Book One: Rider is now on Amazon!  The book is available from www.amazon.com

For those of you who'd like to read an excerpt before you commit $10.00 to the book you can visit www.jimbernheimer.com and download the .doc file for your consideration.

TL;DR version: Harry is loosely based on Tony Stark, some cliches are used, others attacked.  Story is way out there, and will be challenging for a lot of readers.

When I started writing Hogwarts' Dawn, I had several goals in mind, and several cliches I wanted to look at.  

So read on - it may contain spoilers.

TL;DR Version: Stories are not betad like they used to be, and the writing itself is worse.  Don't like? Don't read.

Full Version:

After years of trying to fool myself into thinking that I'll get back to writing like I once did, I've faced the fact that those days are gone.  Stories like Hope, WK,GQ, TMW etc are in my past, and will not be topped.  

Stories posted in the future will either be lightly betad or not betad at all.  I am well aware that the quality of the work will be a lot less because of this.  If that sort of thing bothers you, then please, do NOT read anything new.    Previously I had ambitions (delusions) of being a professional writer, I've accepted that won't happen, and that I'll just keep writing shittier fanfiction until I run out of stories, then I'll do something else.  The cost of writing like I used to is to high for me to pay now, and I have different priorities.

Along with the technical problems, my reasons for writing have changed.  Now, I just write for my own personal entertainment, so I end up taking shortcuts, writing cliches and generally falling into bad habits.  If I hadn't written ffa.net, I probably wouldn't even post the stories here.  But at the end of the day, I pay for this and spend a lot of time making it work, so I should get some benefit from it.  I also find it far more enjoyable to write code for FFA.net than write the stories. 

Remember, this is free entertainment, and you have been warned.

Luan Mao has taken over one of my old stories, and has started to improve it. Modest, too - I'm not normally a fan of other people taking over my work, as I am normally to attached to the characters.  However, when Luan asked to take it over, I actually took the time to read his other stuff and found that I actually quite liked his style.  The darkness is something that I've been heading toward recently.

Anyway, I figure that as I want to read more, it's a good idea to encourage others to read it.

Links:  Modest, Too - Luan Mao

I've updated the main www.fanficauthors.net page, with the oft-requested feature - Show all stories.  Clicking the more link next to every update will show you every story an author has written.

Some big updates today:

• Completely rewritten Epub handling system.  The old one was a hack that relied on all sorts of string munging to work.  The new one is based on DOM handling, and is far cleaner and should be future proof
• With that, I've now checked every epub on the site, and they all validate
• Kindle: You will start to see .lit files appearing next to stories shortly.  These are the epub files re-purposed via calibre.  It's handled via ffa.net's web service, with the actual grunt work being done on my home machine (not installing a full x server on the server)
• Display Options:  I've made the display options far more obvious - there is now a link on top of every story page (for logged in users, obviously) that allows you to change font size, style, story width, and newly, a light-on-dark style sheet.
• Reviews:  I've eliminated all duplicate reviews, and ensured that no one can post any in the future.  It should stop the problems we've been having.  If you see the message "you're review has already been posted..." I'd appreciate it if you could drop me a line (via the contact button above) and tell me what you were doing when it happened.
• Android:  With thanks to Jim_xinu (who was also the first person to find the easter egg in the code), the problem stopping Android based operating systems from downloading epub files has been fixed.  Long story short, a difference between ngingx and Apache meant that I wasn't sanitising some data.

As always, if you see anything that's not right, please let me know.

I've added support for associated images, you can see it with This Means War - and with that, I've added cover images to Ebooks.  As there is no fully defined spec yet, I've followed the recommended style for doing so.  if this works or not, I've yet to actually find out.

I've also fixed a couple of bugs in some of the epub files including:

• Removed borders on chapter pages
• Added site logo to chapter images
• Set background to white
• & not being escaped when in chapter/story title

After a few days' worth of hacking (well, a couple of hours a day), I've added EPUB support to Fanficauthors.net. 

From wikipedia:
EPUB (electronic publication; also sometimes ePub, EPub, or epub) is a free and open e-book standard, by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). Files have the extension .epub. EPUB is designed for reflowable content, meaning that the text display can be optimized for the particular display device. The format is meant to function as a single format that publishers and conversion houses can use in-house, as well as for distribution and sale. It supersedes the Open eBook standard...

In a more open language, it's a way of displaying stories on iPhones, Android, and other mobile devices, including a load of the new ereaders. it isn't, however, supported by Kindle, that uses a proprietary format.

While I've tested it as much as I can, there still may be problems - especially as I don't have a device capable of reading them.  I've tried one of the examples on O'Reily's Bookworm, and run quite a few of the archives through the epubcheck tool.  As such, there is a beta flag next to the download link.  I don't normally like doing this, but being unable to do rigourours testing of anything other than creation and validation, there's not much else I can do.

Irritatingly, the major problem I had was creating the container, as the mimetype file has to be both the first file in the archive, and NOT COMPRESSED.  The zip software I was using was compressing the file, and debugging it was a pain in the rear.  Second problem was the actual xhtml itself.  In order for FFA.net to be as compatible in it's base form as possible, I deliberately use things like the bold tag, rather than a style="" attribute.  The xhtml, of course, required the opposite, so some playing around was required.

Getting close to the end of the bugs that need fixing.

• Added "Print" link back.  Sure, the browser already did the correct thing when you hit print, but dash-it-all if people didn't like that thing
• Added prettier error messages.  Because sometimes, a web page just likes to look good.
• Added favicon, if only to stop the endless request appearing in my logfiles
• Changed the chapter upload procedure so sending stuff live is a lot more obvious
• Rewrote the email notification to actually work this time
• Added "Keep me logged in for a week" button for those that aren't on a browser that saves session cookies...
• Fixed error when authors add completely invalid html that even Tidy doesn't like
• Fixed invalid link to new account creation from review boxes - now people won't get meaningless COPPA warnings
• erm, yeah, and get around to point 4 on the previous post... (to do with the news invalidation etc)

Still to do:

• Work out why using p and b tags together ends up with a strike-through
• Fix the author review emails to have the correct admin link

Update:

A series of events lead me to find that a lot of chapters had FONT tags in them.  These were the cause of the font-resizer/font-changer not working properly in some cases.  So, I started cleaning these files, to find there were more problems with the word cleaner.  Going through all of these meant that I fixed the strike through bug, as well as a load of others.

And as for the author reviews - I just wasn't populating the template with the vars.

As with any new software, there are always some bugs:

1. Word count on updated chapters is massively out
2. Editing stories/chapters updates the posted dates, leading to dates being massively wrong
3. Some people are having problems reading Mature reading stories
4. Cache invalidation for new news posts doesn't work
5. FAQ page doesn't work in IE8
6. Email validation doesn't work when entering manually
7. Some chapters are missing content

These will be addressed as time permits.

Welcome to, what is technically, version 3 of the FFA.net codebase.  Version 2 was never released - although a few of you may have seen it on Kinsfire's personal website.

The main difference for you is the user tools, that should now actually work properly and let you manage your accounts a lot easier.

Another key change is that all usernames are now unique.  If your name has been forcibly changed, you can use the tools, once logged in, to change your name to something a little more user friendly than a number being appended to your existing name.  Note:  The user-rename tool will only be available until the end of January.

All your user data has been transferred across, however, all non-valid accounts (people who haven't received the link) have been wiped out, as has the thousands of spam reviews.  Speaking of which, anonymous reviews are no longer possible,

The main new feature is the ability to see everyone's review history, this has been the main thing that people have asked for.  Clicking a username in a review will take you to the page.

There is also now individual RSS feeds, as well as group RSS feeds, all hidden under the auto discovery item on your modern browser.  And speaking of modern browsers, if you're using IE6, I'm really not interested if the site does or doesn't work.  I know that some people are stuck on it for various legitimate reasons, but as I do this out of my own pocket, I'm simply not willing to invest the time and energy into making it work.

If you do find any bugs, please either use the contact form, or post them on the yahoo group.

While I'm here, I want to say thank you to everyone who helped test, with special thanks going to hga and tgrave, and especially Ralph for their bug finding and reporting skills.  

As always with new code, it's probably going to be a bit of a bumpy ride for the next few weeks, but I'll do what I can to make it as painless as possible.

Technical things you should (maybe) be aware of:

1. All emails now come from @mail.fanficauthors.net - so please add that as a trusted address.  I've added rDNS and SPF records to the dns server.
2. All RSS feeds have changed address - you will need to update your software to get the new updates
3. All RSS feeds are now much more verbose, so you can see what has been updated
4. There is a new /recent/ page, that will show you the latest updates from an author
5. The site is now completely UTF-8 compliant
6. If you have javascript turned off, you will see reduced functionality.  As the only external links on the site are to google (either for stats or jquery hosting) I'd advise white listing the .fanficauthors.net sites.
7. All images have been removed from stories, there is a new gallery feature in the admin for authors to attach stories to.
8. The default time is now set to Europe/London, so the dates on stories may have changed because of it.
9. The font tools are now only available if you are logged in.

I've also taken the opportunity to clean up a few old things.  Some of the more self-indulgent author notes have been truncated, and the Hope epilogue has been removed.  

ETA:

So, bug reports have been coming in - not to many, which is nice.  Fixed items:

1. Logging in displays incorrect error message
2. Site options don't save the font
3. Resize page doesn't work
4. CSS invalid in authorNames
5. FAQ page referred to non-exist content

Well, when I wrote the last post, that was indeed the plan.  What wasn't forseen was that our landlady would sell our current place from under our feet, forcing us to move 2 months early.

With this panic finding a new place to live, we've had to deal with the wonders of British companies (such as NTL - now Virgin) who have conspired to leave me with no broadband for at least two weeks, probably more.  And as I'm going to be off work, I really not be able to access anything.

So hopefully, when I actually get moved, settled, I can get back to doing fun things... like fanfiction.

I've updated Once More (with thanks to Ishtar) with a newer version that should be clearer about some things.

I'm around 95% sure that I will start posting Happily Ever After at the end of Feb/start of March.

After the wonderful fun of being hacked over the weekend, the forum has been changed to something that doesn't run un-sanitised user data through an eval() command.

The import was mostly successful, however there are a few issues (link is on the top of the forum).