An Actual Update.

It's easy enough to start an update after it's been a while with some pithy one liner like

"Guess who's back..."

And then wait for the audience (at least those of a certain age) to reply with

"Back again..."

But we're above that... aren't we...

Ok maybe not, but still we have to at least pretend like we're trying to be adults here. After all this is supposed to be "adult" entertainment.

But there has actually been stuff happening, aside, that is, from narratophile.com breaking and being replaced with a holding page.

A bit of backstory. The site was launched in a hurry, there was a lot going on at the time and it absolutely seemed like there was a need to get something out sooner rather than later. Just get it done rathe rhtna get it done right. There was that need but the need wasn't as urgent as it seemed at the time. After the site was up for a little while it was obvious that while it was doing a simple job and doing it well it wasn't really scalable. A lot of what made the site simple to get up and running as it was at the time also limited it in the future.

I started working on the next version of the site, in fact I'm pretty sure I mentioned it here.

So, if that's the case, where is it and why has it taken so long and all the myriad other questions I'm sure people want to ask, that in essence come down to one simple thing, everyone asking...

WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE STORIES??

I could troll everyone just a little bit and say... right here on my hard drive.

See that 1.3T yeah that's T for Terabyte (not to mention the other half terabyte of Photosets.)

So yeah the data's there, in fact there's likely multiple copies of the data. I've experimented over the half dozen or so years I've been doing this with various ways of collecting and catalouging the stories and as I have plenty of bandwidth and storage space to spare I'll run something even if it means downloading duplicate data.

I've also grown better at this, at knowing what information I need (or usually more importantly what metadata I need) and how to collect stuff so that stays preserved. So it's a little more detailed than loading up a reddit page and just downloading the imgur or imgchest album and then being done with it.

At the start (well the start before I actually built anything, when the site first got built that was entirely for you folks) this was for me and as such I had some ideas about how I wanted it to work. Some of those things turned up in the first version, but not that many of them. I primarily just wanted to improve the reading experience, and that's stilla sriving factor. But if I'm going to do this and invest the time and the money I'm going to do it right and build it how I want it to be built.

And even still that could have been done probably early last year. And I was on my way to that until I had a slight problem. Somewhere to live.

I'll spare you all the gory details but I essentially spent the entirety of 2024 looking for a place for my family and I to live and for a large part of it it was basically a full time job. Even if I had the time to spare, I wasn't in the headspace to do this and a lot of the time financially it was enough of a struggle keeping the existing site up.

But finally in Novmeber we got that all sorted, hopefully for the forseeable future. The Christmas was upon us and it was a few weeks ago now (about mid january) that I spent three or four days and smashed out a large chunk of the new site.

Whilst there are plenty of tweaks and updates from the old site, those of you who have used it before will see a lot that looks very familiar. If it aint broke and all that.

But it's likely the parts of the site you can't see that have changed the most.

The old site revolved around an upload form where I could select an author, then a story say which chapter number it was and then dump all the images into an upload form and let it do it's thing.

That was great if you were uploading new chapters of existing stories, in fact that's what it was focussed around. But that was me approaching it from the perspective of how an author might work, adding a new chaoter to their existing story, much as you'd see on any of the subs, because one-shots are very few and far between these days. Instead what would usually happen is that I'd have to create a new author and then a new story and then get around to uploading the new chapter. It slowed things down.

Over time I customised the process and added some features to make things like that easier. I also had to add other features when I realised that if I fucked up something on the upload I had no way to change it. In fact even when teh site went down there was still one chapter that was broken because something had gone astray when creating it, so it was "missing" from the previous and next buttons that were at the top of each chapter. You could still access it from the story page, but just that part of it was "broken".

No what we have is something a little more, lets say detailed, and a lot more automated.

No I can pick a reddit post, tell what story it's for, what author and what chapter it is. I can use the post images for title cards for the chapter or story itself and I also have access to the author's comments within the thread for any extra details they may have,

Once the chapter is created I can also associate posts from other subreddits (as many stories re posted to multiple subs) with this chapter.

Using the author's comments and other info in the system I can list all the albums used by this story and see if they've been downloaded. i can also see if there's author and model support links (Patreon, OF etc) and then link them to the chapter/story/author/model

And finally there's creating the chapter. There's still some automation left to work on (now that I've sorted out the albums stuff) but in the meantime as the information is pre-filled from above (also if the author or the story doesn't exist it's a single click to create them based on the information from above) I can just drag and drop the files, click the create chapter and be done.

The work is far from finished and to be honest it's only that my children are returning to school at the end of this week that's held things up just enough to stop the site from being properly launched.

So the final question is where's the site...

Well, as much as it's the same it now looks a bit different and for a bunch of reasons (part of which were because it was always for me in the first place) it now has a new name

So welcome to Sinclair Kosh's Story Archive.

https://sinclairkosh.com

There may be some posts there by the time this goes up, or there may not, like I said it's still being worked on. But that's not the exciting bit.

 This version of the site has user accounts. You'll be able to follow authors, block authors, stories and possibly even entire categories of stories (that's still to come at the moment it's purely following people) and I'm still not sure, but I'm considering making a reddit reader (just for subs related to this field) available. With the new structure and the information that I have and will be collecting there's a great deal more than can be done. The screenshot above shows the ability to register, but that's been turned off on the public site at the moment. Once we reach a certain point of stability around some of the basic features that'll be turned on.

In the meantime paid subscribers to this patreon will get access to user accounts on the site. I'm working on automating the process but at the moment I'll have to resort to doing it manually.

There's a bunch more going on, including over at Substack, where I'll be posting daily reviews of well the daily postings and other interesting things. So check that out. There's a link on the banner of the site.

This post is already afr too long so I'll leave it at that and be back with more news soon and updates on how things are going.

Here's to a wonderful 2025. Hope you'll join us for the ride.

Until next time,

Kosh