News

Update Dates Reverted - 5/02/2010

The site has been erronously recording certain stories as being updated since the update algorithm change. I've reverted the update dates back to what they were before the change. I also fixed the problem with the erronous updates and also fixed a problem with the way the expected update date for a story was being computed. Note that it was just the update dates, not the chapter counts, that were incorrect. This effectively means that if a story was updated between 4/24/2010 and 5/2/2010, the update date will be incorrect: it will have the update date before that update. Hopefully that won't be a problem. I don't have any way to determine which erronous updates actually were for real story updates, so that is the best I can do.

Update Algorithm Changed - 4/24/2010

The story upgrade algorithm underwent some pretty dramatic changes. Before the change, we were updating all the stories in one go, which took around 6 hours. For some reason, that made the hosting company unhappy, so they started terminating the update in the middle. That prevented many stories from being updated. Now, the updates run once an hour, and each time it updates a certain number of stories (1500 at the moment, but I may tweak it later on). What stories get updated is now based on when the story was last checked and when the next update is expected for the story. The site now remembers the last 10 updates for each story, and uses the average time between updates to try to guess when the next update will be. Now, each update only takes around 5 minutes to complete, so the hosting company is back being happy (at least as far as I can tell). At the moment, it looks like it is taking about 28 hours to update all the stories.

New Features - 2/23/10

Support for multiple categories is finally complete

MNFF Updates Temporarily Disabled

MNFF is doing an upgrade. I've disabled updates of MNFF until their site is back up and I've had a chance to fix whatever breaks as a result of their upgrades

New Features Unveiled - 1/27/2008

Today, story recommendations, related stories, and the ability to add stories to a new list in the story info page was added. Story recommendations and related stories are updated every 4 hours. Otherwise, they are static lists.

Site Temporarily Down Down - 11/26/2007

The site was temporarily down from about 2:00 AM to 12:00 pm due to an operating system error.

Site Temporarily Down Due to Power Outage - 11/12/2007

Due to a power outage, this site was down for abut 10 minutes (from about 10:20 to 10:30 PM EST). The UPS battery backup was able to keep the site running for about an hour during the outage. The system shut down successfully well before the batteries ran out, so no data was lost. I also do nightly backups to a different hard drive at 2:00 EST.

Score Function Changed - 8/28/2007

Details are available in the FAQ.

Portkey.org Support Added - 8/19/2007

Portkey.org support has now been rolled out. Please let me know if you have any problems with it!

FicWad Fixed - 8/19/2007

FicWad underwent a fairly major overhaul. I've fixed things here so that it works again.

Fiction Alley Updates Temporarily Disabled - 7/7/2007

Fiction Alley seems to be having major technical issues at the moment. I am disabling updates there until those are sorted out. Update: Fiction Alley updates have been enabled again.

New Features Added - 2/3/2007

Today support was rolled out for FicWad. Also, pages were added giving access to public lists defined by users as well as pages for individual users and individual stories.

Checkmated! support added - 9/19/2006

Today I finished adding support for Checkmated! Please let me know if you have any problems with it. I am kind of behind on documentation, so there isn't anything in the FAQ about it yet.

HPFF Broken - 9/9/2006

Harry Potter Fan Fiction underwent a major upgrade and changed all of the ids of the stories. Unfortunately, those are what this site uses to identify the stories by. I'll try to find as many of the new story ids as I can.

Site Moved - 8/31/2006

Today at midnight this site was moved to a new computer.

Regular Lists fixed and Site Moving - 8/29/2006

It looks like I forgot to copy the Javascript file for the Regular List editor, so those were not working. That is fixed now. Also, this site is finally going to leave my laptop and be moved to a different computer. That will happen tommorrow starting at midnight.

Lists, Ratings, and Favorites Page sorting are here - 8/22/2006

Thanks again to all of you who submitted surveys. It looks like the most wanted feature is story suggestions, followed very closely by support for more sites. Implementing story suggestions will be a bit tricky. I have something that works now, but it is really slow, and I'll need to make it much more efficient before it makes its way here. In the mean time, I've been contacting some fan fiction sites to try to get their approval for being added here. Meanwhile, I have lots of other things planned. One major thing that is coming up is that I will at some point be giving the site a makeover. I've been learning CSS, and there are a lot of cool things I can do to make it look better. Another thing I'm planning is a page for each user they can give out as a list of their favorite stories that any one can access. Basically, the lists marked as public would be displayed in a pretty manner along with any biographical information you want to provide, your website, optionally a way for people to email you, and anything else I think of. If you have ideas for what you think should be on there, be sure to let me know! You can contact me using this form. Another thing that is coming is that you will be able to say that you only want to be emailed about stories that are in a certain list.

I just finished adding support for lists to this site. Now instead of having one big long list of stories you can divide your stories into groups like "First Year Stories," "Manipulative Dumbledore Stories," "Fanfiction.net stories," and so forth. There are two kinds of lists -- Regular Lists and AutoLists. AutoLists are really powerful but kind of confusing, so I'll attempt to describe them first. To make an AutoList you need to specify the conditions a particular story needs to meet in order to be included in the list. You do this by specifying a sequence of terms (which are things like "site is fanfiction.net" and "total chapters > 5"). To add another condition, click the "And button." So if you want an autolist that includes all fanfiction.net stories that have more than 5 chapters you would need two terms, the first being "site is fanfiction.net" and the second being "total chapters is greater than 5". Basically, condition is that the conditions say in plain english. If you want there to be several possible ways for a story to be included (for example: either the number of chapters in greater than 5 or the site is MuggleNet), click "Or". When I have a chance I'll write a help page with lots of examples to hopefully make this more clear. For now, though, this will have to do since it's past midnight and I need to get up early tommorrow.

Time Between Updates Reduced - 7/18/2006

Due to bandwidth concerns expressed by some of the fan fiction sites, I have reduced the time between chapter count updates to 4 hours.

Survey Posted - 7/23/2006

I made up a survey to try to figure out how you guys feel about some of the features I am thinking about adding and to get some idea if I should add support for more fan fiction sites. It is locaed here. I sent out a mass email about it so that anyone who has created an account here will know about it.

FAQ Update underway - 7/15/2006

I have begun updating the FAQ to reflect the changes that were made over the last few days. Some parts are completely wrong now. I'll let you know when I'm done.

While I'm doing this, I'll talk a bit about some new things I'm thinging about adding. The first is a contact form that will send emails to my real email address (instead of the jhagelberg.com one, which incidently is down at the moment -- a byproduct of moving to Boston. I'm also thinking of making this news thing a bit nicer -- storing the news items in the database, displaying the first few items on the home page, and having a link to the rest of the items. Another thing that I am thinking about is having some kind of a poll to try to figure out what things are most important to you so I know where to spend most of my time. Some things on there will be things like adding support for more fan fiction sites, adding some kind of a bulliton board thing where people can discuss stories (and possibly the site), increasing the speed of the site, making the FAQ more complete, etc. I'm really taking shots in the dark when adding things -- for example no one has added any Sugar Quill stories (not even me!). The more information I have the better off everyone will be.

Really back online - 7/14/2006

Ok. I thought we were back online before, but I just learned that my ISP blocks incoming requests on port 80. That effectively means that this website cannot exist in the same way it did before. This site now officially lives at http://favoritestracker.org:8080/. You can also get to it by going to www.favoritestracker.org -- this is simply a redirect I set up. To get around this I would need a business account which costs $100/month. I may do that at somepoint -- but right now I'll have to live with this workaround. So if you want a bookmark that goes directly to the page with the story listing, make the bookmark point to http://favoritestracker.org:8080/favorites.php. I will put something about this in the FAQ when I have time.

Bug Fixes and New Features - 7/13/2006

Today I (hopefully) fixed the problem about emails not being sent out. I also found many problems having to do with what happens when people try to use an invalid userid. In addition, everything relating to userids and pennames for specific sites has been moved to "Manage Favorites." I think this makes it clearer what is going on. Favorites will only be imported when you go to "Manage Favorites" and import them. Please email me if you have any questions.

Back online but with no email - 7/12/2006

I just got internet service at my new place today. The site is up, but I haven't figured out how to get it to send emails using my new ISP. I'll try to resolve that today or tommorrow.

Upcoming Scheduled Downtime - 7/7/2006

I will be moving to Boston on July 11. The site will go down sometime that morning, probably around 10:00 PDT. Since this site is run off of one of my personal computers the site will be down until I can plug the computer into an Internet connection. I'm not sure when the site will be back up -- it depends on how fast I can get an Internet connection at my new location. The site should be back up by the 14th. I'm switching to cable internet service, so the site should be a little faster once everything is backup up. I'm also in the process of aquiring a new computer dedicated to my websites and other internet-relateed stuff like my email server. Hopefully that will decrease the number of unexpected downtimes.

Domain Name Change - 7/4/2006

Today, the site moved to favoritestracker.org. I say moved, but really the site did not move anywhere -- instead I just pointed favoritestracker.org to it. I've been packing up my stuff, including the computer this site is runnning on. Until things are back to normal this site will be running off of my laptop.

Problems

It looks like this site went down while I was on vacation last week. I restored it last night as soon as I got back.

More MNFF Updates - 4/16/2006

It appears that now I can only look up the UserID for people who have actually written stories. The way I had been doing it before was by looking in the "Authors" section. However, not all authors are shown there anymore due to the changes that have been taking place in MNFF. As a result, you now have to figure out what your own MNFF UserID is. In the process of doing that, I found a bug preventing new users from specifying ids and pennames for sites. I fixed that as well. I also fixed a problem resulting from the need to actually log into MNFF in order to see certain stories.

Update to reflect changes in MNFF - 4/13/2006

Today, MNFF underwent some fairly major changes. I updated the Favorites Tracker to reflect these changes.

More Changes Coming - 4/7/06

I am planning to make it so that Favorites can no longer be forced to be synchronized with a favorites list on another site. That just seems to cause too many problems. The main problem is that it deletes Favorites originally imported from a fan fiction site which do not appear to be on that site any more. The result of this is that when a site goes down your favorites disappear. This also would happen if the way that Favorites are displayed is changed even slightly. Big problems will occur when the display format of the Favorites Lists changes, which will inevitably happen.

Instead of synchronizing your favorites list here with remote favorites lists, you will be able to import favorites from a Favorites List on another site. If you have any strong objections to this, be sure to let me know. I'll start working on this over the weekend, but I don't know when I'll finish. This is a fairly big change.

MuggleNet Fan Fiction Down - 4/7/06

MuggleNet Fan Fiction is down at the moment. Unfortunately, this has caused the Favorites Tracker to think that all of the favorites lists are empty, so those favorites along with their chapter counts have temporarily disappeared. I will restore the old chapter counts from last night's backup as soon as it comes back up.

Update: Done. MNFF is back up, but the favorites lists seem to have been wiped out. I added the favorites back in as "manually added favorites".

Problem Solved - 4/6/06

You aren't going to believe this, but the number of chapters shown in a person's fanfiction.net favorites page actually depends on whether or not a certain cookie has been passed to the web site. This was the source of the Emailing problem. Now I always pass a cookie to fanfiction.net when loading pages from it.

Emailing Bug Found - 4/6/06

Today I discovered that in some cases the Favorites Tracker is sending out multiple emails for the same story. This appears to be because the number of chapters shown on people's favorites pages does not always match the number of chapters that are actually in the story immediately after a chapter is added. It takes some time for the changes to propegate there. I'll try to find a workaround either today or tommorrow.

HPFF Favorites Broken - 3/30/06

harrypotterfanfiction.com seems to have lost all of the favorites for some users (including me). I have restored all HPFF data (including number of read chapters) back to the way it was on 3/27/2006 at 3:00 am. The stories were added as "manully-entered" favorites so they are unaffacted by the brokenness of favorites in HPFF.

New Features - 3/27/06

Over the weekend I added support for time zones and the ability to receive emails when new chapters are added.