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bookmarking and me
Ugh. I was vaguely sick all weekend (again, thanks to inmyriadbits - how it is that she's giving all the viruses to me when I'm the one who works in a service industry?) with a sore throat and fatigue, and finally hit the point yesterday where I needed to call in. I was actually only awake for 8 hours yesterday, in between Nyquil dosings.
Anyway. I ran across A Beginner's Guide to Pinboard yesterday, and started thinking about how I bookmark, which is very very different from that person. From a lot of people, probably.
I currently use Pinboard, where I have 2314 bookmarks in 245 fandoms. I mostly bookmark fic, though I have a couple hundred vids bookmarked that I keep meaning to organize, so they're all currently locked to private. I started off on Delicious in 2006, and bailed out when they went insane last year. Pinboard is possibly the best $9.70 I've spent, in terms of long-term use vs cost: in the last year and a half, I've added over 500 bookmarks, which outstrips my prior bookmarking rate by...a lot.
However, I don't generally bookmark new things. I tried, for a few months, back in 2008 or so, and what happened was that I started composing my bookmark and thinking about which tags to use while I was still reading the fic. Unacceptable. So now I shove the stories I like into my Firefox bookmarks under the general 'to save' folder. At the end of the month, I sort the stories into their respective fandom folders. Then, when I am in the mood, I go back, re-read them, and decide whether or not I care to keep them.
This is useful for several reasons:
1) weeds out a lot of 3AM stories. You know, those fics you read right before going to sleep and then stare in bafflement at later because OMG WHY.
2) filters out the initial fandom flood. I tend to get blinded by my love in the early days of a fandom, and save a ton of fairly dubious things. The re-reading process helps filter that.
3) allows me to bookmark more creatively, ie, not just c/p the summary but pick out alternate quotes or actually express opinions. Since I prefer my bookmarking to be more like traditional recs, that's important.
4) sorts out the 'I liked this' from the 'I'd re-read this again' stories. I generally only keep the latter.
Of course, there are obvious downsides to this, namely the Dreaded Baleeting. For example, I am still quite upset that gqgqqt deleted all of their stories and left fandom before I could save anything. (btw, if anyone still has a copy of Disclosures or that Equilateral series, please please please share.)
The exception to this is Person of Interest. I'm invested enough (and the fandom is small enough) that I feel like keeping current on it is a way of contributing to the community. These days, now that I'm past the first flood of Read All The Things and digging through the archives for forgotten gems, I'm just bookmarking things everyone else has already bookmarked. However, I did have a funny experience last week where I was the first person to bookmark Put Your Little Hand in Mine, and then 9 other people joined in. So that was nice, because it's a great little story and Shaw needs more love, especially when she's written that well.
I'd like to get to the point where I can bookmark ALL of the new stories I found once a month, but I've got another 1000+ bookmarks to wade through before that can happen. We'll see.
That's about it, and now 'bookmarking' has started to look like a fake word, so I'm off to sleep in front of the TV or something. Wish me luck.
Anyway. I ran across A Beginner's Guide to Pinboard yesterday, and started thinking about how I bookmark, which is very very different from that person. From a lot of people, probably.
I currently use Pinboard, where I have 2314 bookmarks in 245 fandoms. I mostly bookmark fic, though I have a couple hundred vids bookmarked that I keep meaning to organize, so they're all currently locked to private. I started off on Delicious in 2006, and bailed out when they went insane last year. Pinboard is possibly the best $9.70 I've spent, in terms of long-term use vs cost: in the last year and a half, I've added over 500 bookmarks, which outstrips my prior bookmarking rate by...a lot.
However, I don't generally bookmark new things. I tried, for a few months, back in 2008 or so, and what happened was that I started composing my bookmark and thinking about which tags to use while I was still reading the fic. Unacceptable. So now I shove the stories I like into my Firefox bookmarks under the general 'to save' folder. At the end of the month, I sort the stories into their respective fandom folders. Then, when I am in the mood, I go back, re-read them, and decide whether or not I care to keep them.
This is useful for several reasons:
1) weeds out a lot of 3AM stories. You know, those fics you read right before going to sleep and then stare in bafflement at later because OMG WHY.
2) filters out the initial fandom flood. I tend to get blinded by my love in the early days of a fandom, and save a ton of fairly dubious things. The re-reading process helps filter that.
3) allows me to bookmark more creatively, ie, not just c/p the summary but pick out alternate quotes or actually express opinions. Since I prefer my bookmarking to be more like traditional recs, that's important.
4) sorts out the 'I liked this' from the 'I'd re-read this again' stories. I generally only keep the latter.
Of course, there are obvious downsides to this, namely the Dreaded Baleeting. For example, I am still quite upset that gqgqqt deleted all of their stories and left fandom before I could save anything. (btw, if anyone still has a copy of Disclosures or that Equilateral series, please please please share.)
The exception to this is Person of Interest. I'm invested enough (and the fandom is small enough) that I feel like keeping current on it is a way of contributing to the community. These days, now that I'm past the first flood of Read All The Things and digging through the archives for forgotten gems, I'm just bookmarking things everyone else has already bookmarked. However, I did have a funny experience last week where I was the first person to bookmark Put Your Little Hand in Mine, and then 9 other people joined in. So that was nice, because it's a great little story and Shaw needs more love, especially when she's written that well.
I'd like to get to the point where I can bookmark ALL of the new stories I found once a month, but I've got another 1000+ bookmarks to wade through before that can happen. We'll see.
That's about it, and now 'bookmarking' has started to look like a fake word, so I'm off to sleep in front of the TV or something. Wish me luck.