If you’ve been following our release notes, you know that we have been working towards full HTTPS support on the Archive for a while now. Today, we’re happy to announce that beginning on October 4th, all connections to the Archive will use HTTPS by default.
ICYMI: We had to, quite literally, turn HTTPS off and on again a few times over the past several months as we fiddled with server settings to get us through times of peak traffic. With new frontend servers in place and whirring happily away, HTTPS is now officially the standard for connecting to the AO3! If this doesn’t work for you, we still provide HTTP access through insecure.archiveofourown.org. 👍
There’s this fic on AO3 that, according to my history page, I have visited 176 times. Which means I alone am responsible for 176 hits on that fic. I commented on some of the chapters, but only a few, because I feel like a stalker when I comment every week. I gave it kudos, but I can only give it one, even though it’s one of my favorites.
So just remember, when you’re looking at that hit count and wondering why you don’t have that same number of kudos (divided by the number of chapters, because each one of those also counts as a hit), it might be because some people out there love your fic. They read it when they’re feeling down. They open it in the waiting room at the doctors office, or in the lonesome dark of night. They turn to it in celebration when they did something right. They open it over and over so they can send the link to their friends, or just to revisit the characters that they love. They checked it ten times in one day, hoping that you had updated.
A disparity between hits and kudos does not mean that your readers didn’t like your fic, or that they were too lazy to hit the kudos button. It means that some of them came back, and there’s nothing that makes me happier about my writing than that.
I saw this post by @astropixie about how it’d be nice to review fics on AO3 as you read. A little while back, because I was so in awe of the Clexa fic writers, I made this userscript (can install on Firefox by using Greasemonkey and on Chrome and Opera by using Tampermonkey) so that I could do just that. It doesn’t have the wattpad or soundcloud functionality, it’s just a little thing added on to a page, not something supported by the site itself, but it’s better than nothing.
So, if you’re like me and all “AAAAH THIS IS AMAZING NOW i WON’T HAVE TO HAVE TWO TAGS OPEN AT A TIME WHEN I READ!”
but then you go to make it happen and you’re like “…fuck, how the fuck does this work, i am not a programmer, i can barely html bold and italics, i am screwed”
This is a fun option if you use, for example, phrases in other languages in your story. I often do, and this is a nice way to give translations without having to scroll to the end of the text, or putting them in the starting notes where people have to keep checking back – or where they spoiler the story!
HOWEVER. The drawback is that the floating boxes only work when a ‘mouse’ is ‘hovered’ over the marked text. They do NOT show up on tablet or phone screens, so you’ll still need to put a list of translations in the notes for readers using those devices.
Let’s have an example.
“Qu’est ce que tu veux?”
Now if you speak French, you might know that means “What do you want?”
But not all of your readers will know that. So, you offer them a translation. And since the boxes don’t appear unless you hover directly above them, I usually add a Beginning Note to the chapter that reads something like this;
‘Hover over italicised foreign language text for translations! (Mobile and tablet users please see the Ending Notes)’
In HTML mode in Ao3, (if you try this in Rich Text mode you will get a horrible mess so don’t) the line with this example would appear as:
<p>“<em>Qu’est ce que tu veux?</em>”</p>
To add the floating box with the translation, you would select the words to be translated (that is, Qu’est ce que tu veux?) and paste in the following HTML.
<span title=“What do you want?”>Qu’est ce que tu veux?</span>
The whole line will now read:
<p>“<em> <span title=“What do you want?”>Qu’est ce que tu veux?</span> </em>”</p>
Review your work, hover over the part that requires translating, and you should see the following:
And you’re done!
I tend to set up a Word doc with all the <span> lines I want to use created in it, and then when the time comes, just copy/paste them into Ao3. Saves lots of time!
SliceOSunshine 