Posting around here has been a little light for the last few days. The reason is that I've been reading a rather large and difficult to read blog fiction. I'll be writing all about soon. There's something else I wanted to talk about in this post. How does one "bookmark" his\her progress when reading a blog fiction?
Here's what I mean: Say you're reading through the archives of a blog fiction, but the archives are much too large to read through in one sitting. How do you mark off where you left off? You could just use the "bookmark" feature of your web browser. Although, if you do that you have to remember to delete the old one after creating a second one. The second problem is that if you aren't viewing the content one post per page, instead using something like the date ranges to display multiple posts per page, you'll still have to remember which individual post on that page you last read.
If you're reading a blog fiction that has multiple characters, it could get even more complex. If you're reading one character at a time you have to keep track which ones you've read. If the posts are stored on different blogs, now you gotta have a bookmark for each blog. If you're reading in chronological order, that means you have to delete and create multiple bookmarks every time you have to answer the phone, or yell at the kids because they don't know how to share their wii.
All of this is just a long winded way to point out another way that reading a book is easier than reading a blog fiction. "Saving your spot" isn't always as easy as sticking in a bookmark or folding over the corner of the page.
This may seem like thing to complain about, but I assure you I'm not above complaining about the little things in life. If I'm taking a 15-20 minute break from something (say my day job or honey-do list), I don't want to spend 5 of those minutes trying to figure out where I left off. That's like a quarter or third of my break. If I was reading a book or magazine instead, I could've spent that extra time reading the end of a long article or one of those tiny little chapters in The Da Vinci Code.
I don't suppose any one has a simple way to solve this problem that I didn't think of?
How to Save Your Spot When Reading Fiction Online
Labels: Blog Fiction |
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1 Comentário:
Hi - I'm myself trying to find a good way to catch up on all your excellent analyses of Blogfic without losing my place :-).
I'd add to the issue that with a lot of blogfic, especially multiple character blogfic, you not only have to remember where you were but what direction you were heading. Bookmarks become almost meaningless when there are multiple reading orders. What would be more useful is a way of marking what you've already read. If there's a sitemap somewhere, you can normally tell that by the colour of the hyperlinks (until your browser refreshes its cache, at any rate.) I suppose you could design a site so that people get cookies updated that take them back to where they were, but that's beyond my HTML skills. I do remember, from when I used to design simple websites, that there was a bookmark tag you could use to link directly to a certain paragraph. A considerate writer could put one of those on each entry and provide a URL to copy and paste into a notepad document.
I actually quite like literally getting lost in a blogfic, tag-jumping and pursuing threads off onto a tangent, but I suppose I always keep in mind the main path and skip back to it when I find myself wandering too far.
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