Can the "Dragonprints" counter be set to not count the author's opening the story when the author is logged in?

[Wilde_Guess]

Hi, @manta2g and all.

The subject line sums it up nicely.  We aren’t all writing She’s The One.  If I look at one of my stories, the Dragonprints counter counts me just the same as an actual reader.  While some authors might like running up their counters, I would rather know if someone else is looking at the story.  Since I don’t have my stories here completed anywhere, and since I don’t have a beta, I end up looking at a chapter multiple times to get it where I want it, especially if a change to a story creates a continuity error.

Thanks in advance either way.

[Desiderius Price]

First, I’m super glad to be able to post stories again!

Second, *do* have a copy somewhere else, whether it’s USB or google drive, or even pen/paper.

[Wilde_Guess]

57 minutes ago, Desiderius Price said:

First, I’m super glad to be able to post stories again!

Second, *do* have a copy somewhere else, whether it’s USB or google drive, or even pen/paper.

Same here, Desiderius Price.

I still have the “older” chapters of my stuff “here and there.”  But when I checked the computer I’m using now, I noticed that I hadn’t moved quite a few older chapters of Lincoln Way to the current computer.  So, rather than tearing into the other computer(s) that don’t exactly work to retrieve them, I’ve started downloading them from here.  Of course, since there are several continuity errors I needed to fix anyway, and a few other places where I wanted to polish things up a bit, I’ve also been fixing the early chapters I’ve downloaded, saving the changes, and uploading the updated text.  I’ll have Chapter 6 up and be working on Chapter 7 before I call it a night.

The ‘new’ text editor doesn’t screw up the formatting like the old one did, so the uploads are almost effortless.  But downloading (actually copy-and-pasting) the existing chapters back into Word screws up the formatting there.  So, I’m having to relocate paragraph breaks as well as reading everything over and making changes.  It’s much easier (at least for me) to put the initial paragraph breaks back in where I had them, then change it up and move it around rather than just getting a 13,000 word ball and try to tease it out by itself. 

Do you know of an “easy” way to replace the word “paperboy” with the word “papírák”?  I sure don’t, but that’s one of the smaller changes I’m making.  Word won’t let you paste into the ‘replace with’ box, but the archive text editor does.

Back to the original request, I’m having enough trouble with timelines and birthdays, and the character ages and timing are actually important to the story-lines in the plot.  I really don’t want to also try keeping notes of how many time I opened the displayed story to figure out how many “Dragonpoints” are actually other people.

It might not be possible for manta2g to turn off tracking logged-in author peeks into the Dragonprints like I asked.  But if they can turn it off, I don’t think it hurts to ask.

The other “big” story I have here is much further along over at “St. Elsewhere,” I’m still stuck on how to lay out an important conversation and portray a later important event on it, and I’m not missing any chapters of that one.

Thanks.

[Desiderius Price]

15 minutes ago, Wilde_Guess said:

I still have the “older” chapters of my stuff “here and there.”   [snip]

Lemme mention how I’ve geeked out on all this writing

1. Cron-job to back up my regular files to another BIG hard drive, runs every six hours, rotates to a new folder every month.  YES, this has bailed me out on more than one occasion with “didn’t mean to wipe out/overwrite a file”.  Every several months, usually when my file-explorer shows the disk to be full, do I go and clear out those really old copies.
   In theory, also backing them up with subversion (a source control software coders can use…)  But I’ve kinda let that one slip.
2. WROTE a formatting tool, it’ll take marked up text files, spit out files formatted to the different archives I use (AFF, AO3, & FFN) or even ordinary HTML (using CSS).  It’s even got a filtering feature that I lean on to make the explicit vs cleaner versions of my potter fanfic.  (Note, if you’re not afraid of compiling software, of using the command line, I open source this utility, it’s up on GITHUB.)
3. Writing a database software for tracking my story details, this has been an ongoing project since it first started in java many years ago, when I realized that spiral notebooks were getting more & more obnoxious… and I tended to not check them like I should.  It’s now evolved into a web-server with sqlite (for caching), that’s effectively becoming a wiki with attributes, that repeatedly scan your database in files for changes – it’s very much a WIP.  I want to bring the automatic family-tree graph back from an earlier version (I’ll be overjoyed when I do).  For those that aren’t also software developers… I’ve seen advertisements for World Anvil, it might be equivalent to what I want to do, not sure, but then I like controlling my own data files, not willing to trust them to the “cloud”.
4. And, been building/maintaining two databases (ie directories with lots of files), one for the potter fanfic, the other for my originals.

I know this doesn’t address the dragon prints head on, but it’s why I worry less… got nice HTML browsable versions of my stories on my drive.  On occasion, I do have to verify the formatting after I post, so that’s why I’d like this feature myself … it’d be good for the author to be able to check w/o bumping the counter.

One suggestion, as you’re the author, save-em from the archive so you’ve got a local copy w/o having to rummage into that old computer.

 

[Wilde_Guess]

7 hours ago, Desiderius Price said:

[chop!]

One suggestion, as you’re the author, save-em from the archive so you’ve got a local copy w/o having to rummage into that old computer.

 

Hello, Desiderius Price and all.

I am downloading and saving the ‘missing’ chapters.  I’ve also been fixing them as I’ve gone along, which is why I’m only up to and working on Chapter 8 right now.  Just downloading and saving each of the few chapters I don’t have on this computer would take very little time to accomplish, even manually.

While I was “in the trade” myself, my skils have run far more on the O/S and hardware level, rather than the level of DBAs or webpage authoring tools.  Admittedly, I can also be lazy at times, just like anyone else.  If I get to the point of wanting a multi-machine network running at the house again, the cron or launchd suggestion has merit, along with Time Machine.