I'd save stories to my hard drive, because I was on dial up and that way the phone would be free even with my reading fic :)
Ohh, dial-up. Our little 14.4kbps modem that could! My family all shared a computer when I was in high school, and we had a separate phone line for the internet, so whether I was online reading for hours or offline reading for hours wouldn't have mattered (and I WAS online reading for hours, hour and hours, usually late at night/in the wee hours of the morning; I believe this all coincided with AOL switching from hourly to flat monthly rates). I don't think I was savvy enough to even know I COULD save web pages locally, or how to go about it. And I've never printed fic out, it's always been a 100% electronic experience for me.
Now I save pretty much randomly, because LJ fandom without a central archive (i.e., SPN/J2 as opposed to SGA) loses stories all the time. Deleted journals, locked journals, name changes, you name it...it's quite frustrating, and even if I know I won't get to read right away, i try to safe. (Though the 15 post format that LJ requires/invites isn't welcoming to that)
It's extremely frustrating! That's basically the reason I use the broadest possible guidelines for saving fic, because I have no guarantee that it'll still be on the internet when I go looking for it later. Well, also because I'm more than a little compulsive, let's be honest. What I DON'T do is save fic that I haven't read yet, because it makes me horribly anxious and guilty to have a growing pile of unread fic on my computer, and I get enough of that from my unsorted music collection. Fic that I mean to read one day, but not today and probably not tomorrow, goes in a separate dedicated delicious account; and if a link is broken by the time I'm ready to follow it, that's just the way it goes. :/
But trust me, the one story I'm trying to recollect...that's the one I forgot to save. EVERY DAMN TIME :)
Oh god, YES. Murphy's Law is alive and well in fandom. Murphy, why you gotta do us like that?? :(
Also: very cool poll! And I'd never even tried to estimate how many stories I'd saved.
Thanks! :D I'm obviously at a bit of a loss as to where to go from here in terms of how I do things, and thought perhaps other people on the internet might have brilliantly efficient solutions, or that at least we could commiserate with each other. And I'm a little obsessed with numbers! Plus mine are very easy to add up (the ones on my hard drive) because they're all in one place, and delicious counts them for you; I can see that if you had some in print, some in files all over your computer, some in the cloud, etc. it would be difficult! I would be interested in word counts, too. I adore long fic, but since I started keeping track of word counts in my bookmarks, it's very clear that they make a neat bell curve that skews toward longer fic but spikes right in the 1,000-5,000-word range.
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Ohh, dial-up. Our little 14.4kbps modem that could! My family all shared a computer when I was in high school, and we had a separate phone line for the internet, so whether I was online reading for hours or offline reading for hours wouldn't have mattered (and I WAS online reading for hours, hour and hours, usually late at night/in the wee hours of the morning; I believe this all coincided with AOL switching from hourly to flat monthly rates). I don't think I was savvy enough to even know I COULD save web pages locally, or how to go about it. And I've never printed fic out, it's always been a 100% electronic experience for me.
Now I save pretty much randomly, because LJ fandom without a central archive (i.e., SPN/J2 as opposed to SGA) loses stories all the time. Deleted journals, locked journals, name changes, you name it...it's quite frustrating, and even if I know I won't get to read right away, i try to safe. (Though the 15 post format that LJ requires/invites isn't welcoming to that)
It's extremely frustrating! That's basically the reason I use the broadest possible guidelines for saving fic, because I have no guarantee that it'll still be on the internet when I go looking for it later. Well, also because I'm more than a little compulsive, let's be honest. What I DON'T do is save fic that I haven't read yet, because it makes me horribly anxious and guilty to have a growing pile of unread fic on my computer, and I get enough of that from my unsorted music collection. Fic that I mean to read one day, but not today and probably not tomorrow, goes in a separate dedicated delicious account; and if a link is broken by the time I'm ready to follow it, that's just the way it goes. :/
But trust me, the one story I'm trying to recollect...that's the one I forgot to save. EVERY DAMN TIME :)
Oh god, YES. Murphy's Law is alive and well in fandom. Murphy, why you gotta do us like that?? :(
Also: very cool poll! And I'd never even tried to estimate how many stories I'd saved.
Thanks! :D I'm obviously at a bit of a loss as to where to go from here in terms of how I do things, and thought perhaps other people on the internet might have brilliantly efficient solutions, or that at least we could commiserate with each other. And I'm a little obsessed with numbers! Plus mine are very easy to add up (the ones on my hard drive) because they're all in one place, and delicious counts them for you; I can see that if you had some in print, some in files all over your computer, some in the cloud, etc. it would be difficult! I would be interested in word counts, too. I adore long fic, but since I started keeping track of word counts in my bookmarks, it's very clear that they make a neat bell curve that skews toward longer fic but spikes right in the 1,000-5,000-word range.