enchantedsleeper

*looks at date* errrrr

So, I guess May got away from me in a similar fashion to April ^^;

I spent the time doing some cool offline and online/creative things, so it's not like I haven't done things that I wanted to! I just didn't have the time for blogging that I'd hoped/anticipated. (Also, I think that some of my "less time" was due to making a concerted effort to fix my terrible sleeping schedule and stop being tired all the time, whereas normally I would have stayed up an extra hour or two).

However, that isn't to say I haven't been doing some Dreamwidth things! So, here's what I've been up to (and also some archiving stuff off the back of Archive April/general archiving thoughts).
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In my recent deep fic writer asks post I mentioned that I was embarking on a project to archive all of my created fanworks (no matter how old and cringey) on a personal archive website.

Since I wrote that post, I've spent a good chunk of very fun hours creating and tinkering with the archive site in question, and although I'm far from done, I'm excited enough to share the site so far (enchantedsleeper.space) and write a bit about what creating it has been like. It's going to be on the long side, so buckle in...

How it started

I've been following the trend of "web 1.0" and "indie web" design for a little while now, looking at the fun websites and shrines that people have been making, and wanting to try my hand at making something myself. I didn't really know what to make it about, though. Back in the days of Actual Web 1.0 (which I just caught the tail end of, since I first got online in 2002) I did have a gloriously tacky personal website with a free web building service whose name is sadly lost to the grave of my old AOL bookmarks; but this time around, I wanted to do more with it than just make a Me Website.

I had an idea to make a kind of tech musings site with a little archive of retro "stuff" that my husband and I have hung onto - old gaming consoles, my beloved 1990s Psion - and I'm definitely not ruling that out, because it's still a fun idea, but it was just sort of added to the backburner of "Things I might get around to eventually".

Then I saw melannen 's how-to guide on creating your own personal fic archive, and I thought "Damn, I want to do that." Partly it was seeing the cute things that other people had done with their own fic archives and reading their enthusiasm towards simple, home-made HTML sites. The other part was that earlier this year, I embarked on a "just for fun" project of making a spreadsheet that listed all of my published fanworks, of any kind (mostly fic, but also fanart, fancomics and fanvids). It was fun tracking down my various works and seeing them all laid out, charting my migration from Fanfiction.net to AO3 and from fandom to fandom.

I've never archived them all in one place - I know AO3 exists to archive things, but I've always hesitated to add some of my oldest, cringiest works to my profile there, preferring to let them sit in obscurity at the bottom of my FF.net author page. But a personal fanworks archive felt like the right place to finally have them all in one place - and the idea of choosing my own categorising and tagging conventions was pleasing.

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