Story Monitor Extension

Information for Archive Owners

At the moment, Story Monitor will make one hit to your site each time a reader presses the update button on their story list.

The hit will re-download the HTML page for the last chapter the user read. Only the HTML is retrieved - no additional resources such as images / style sheets are downloaded.

In future I hope to optimise this by fetching information on multiple stories in a single hit. However, this will require collaboration with the authors of the archiving software. Watch this space....

Supported Archives

Story Monitor currently supports:

• Sites powered by the open source E-Fiction software
• Sites powered by IO Design's Storyline software
• www.fanfiction.net and www.mediaminer.org

E-Fiction powered sites that require you to login in order to read stories are not supported.

If your site uses a different platform, it should be relatively simple to add support in a future version of Story Monitor as long as your platform meets the following requirements:

• Each chapter is published on its own page with its own URL that can be accessed from a browser bookmark (i.e. using the GET protocol)
• Users do not have to login to read stories (unless the login details are also stored in the URL)
• The following are displayed in a fixed location on every chapter page or can be extracted from the URL:
  • Story title
  • Author name
  • Number of the current chapter
  • Number of chapters or a drop-down list of links to chapters

If you would like support for an archive added, please use the Sourceforge Feature Requests tracker and supply the name of the archive software, a link to its homepage and a link to your archive.

Server-Side Plug-ins

It is my intention to develop plugins for E-Fiction and Storyline that will provide a means for Story Monitor to efficiently fetch update information about multiple stories in one go using an XML data feed. This will happen after the version 1.0 release. If you run an archive using either of these two platforms and are interested in testing the plugin, please post on the General Forum.

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