[GUI Plugin] FanFicFare

[dailyalice]

Hey everybody, long time no type. Still use & adore FanFicFare. Need to catch up here on latest developments (haven't updated my ini in a while).

Ages ago I started writing up a tutorial for setting up a Fanfic library in Calibre for use with FanFicFare and I was thinking about picking that up again. Was wondering if anyone else had put together anything (other than what's in the Wiki) or was working on such a thing? No sense duplicating efforts, could be good to work together on something.

Also as I was looking over my old notes, I noticed that how I configure a Calibre Library for use with FanFicFare is very specific . . . the various custom columns I create (to track Kudos on AO3 and various other things). Is it possible to create what amounts to a blank Calibre Library with good basic default custom columns etc. for use with FanFicFare and then share it to save other people some setup? (Or simply to save myself setup if I decide to create a new separate Fanfic library, for that matter.)

I just know when I've worked on the tutorial and when I've tried explaining how things work to some people, it's rather daunting and saving even a bit of setup might be useful. (Of course not everyone agrees on what custom columns are essential for use with FanFicFare, I imagine mileage varies. But surely there are some common ones that most use. Maybe a library designed to work with the default personal.ini or that covers all the metadata FanFicFare is capable of downloading?)

[JimmXinu]

As you mentioned, there are some pages in the wiki such as the one about using Reading Lists with FFF to sync devices.

I would also point out that it is a wiki. Users can edit pages; not sure about adding new ones--but I certainly can do it for you on request.

As for custom columns, it seems to vary an astonishing amount from user to user what they each read, from what sites, and what they choose to track. Word count and Updated date are probably universal, but that's about it, in my experience.

I suppose if there's interest, I could look into adding feature(s) that would let you click a button in FFF somewhere to add new custom columns for certain FFF metadata entries. But they'd be the 'standard' FFF metadata entries, not site specific ones like AO3's 'kudos'.

[dailyalice]

Good point, of course, about the wiki! I should give it another look (it's been awhile) and think about what I see as things that are missing there and if I could fill in any gaps. If nothing else, I may have some user submitted content for you one of these days. :-)

I like the idea of clicking a button to add custom columns and I probably shouldn't have used Kudos as my example anyway as, as you said, it's site specific. And you're right, mileage probably does vary a lot here. But I know I found myself clicking a lot between FanFicSettings and/or the personal.ini and the custom column page to try and suss out what I needed to add and what already was covered and so on.

I do love how customizable FanFicFare and Calibre are, I just know that when I went to create a shiny new fanfic library and started writing down the steps (and tried to remember all the steps), there seemed like a lot of them. Of course my library may be more complex than most or just different than most.

As ever thanks so much for all the work you do on this invaluable bit of software. I really do aim to be helpful here and not just create more work for you! (Honest!)

[Tanjamuse]

I have screenshots of all the columns I need when I create a new library, and a checklist for rules for colors and icons

[mehetabelo]

You can create a new library with all the columns by using the calibre option to create a new library with the option 'Copy structure from the current library'. This seems to copy over the FFF configuration information and as well.

So, editing a newly created database with the copied info as a base would be more than possible. I have, in fact, done this before and created one with all the information filled in (taking out user/pass info) and shared it with a friend. He just installed Calibre, used the database, installed FFF and was ready to go. Although now, with shared libraries he tends to just download stuff directly from my library. He's so damn lazy sometimes. /sigh

As a note, I (think) I consider kudos to be a 'favorite', and have it make a note in my favorite column (one specifically for fanfiction.net). I'm not on my home computer to do travel and can't check at this time. I don't download a huge amount from AO3 so I'm not 100% sure that's what I decided to do.

[JimmXinu]

New test version posted

2017-10-17
- adapter_webnovelcom: normalize story URL.
- adapter_harrypotterfanfictioncom: https default now.

[mob]

Apologies if this was asked & answered before but didnt find anything with site search - novelupdates.com is not supported?

Thsk in advance for your comments!

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by mob

Apologies if this was asked & answered before but didnt find anything with site search - novelupdates.com is not supported?

No, it isn't. A few 'novel' sites like that are supported, but not that one.

And, in fact, I'm not sure it should be--it looks like novelupdates.com is an aggregator site that points to stories hosted on other sites.

[Metaxil]

You are correct JimmXinu, Novelupdates is an aggregator. It also can sometimes link to a secodary link which could cause further problems if one we're to try it. It's a very wide variety of sites. I do use it to pull metadata like tags manually, and while it would be wonderful to not have to, I'd guess it would be complicated and probably not worth the time.

[cryzed]

@mob, @Metaxil: I had written an adapter for Novelupdates which relied on various heuristics to work, however this never made it into FanFicFare because it's unreliable (it doesn't work with all sites), and requires you to run a separate script in the background. Since you are interested in something like this, I thought I'd atleast share it.

* newspaper-server.py: to make use of the adapter, this needs to be run using Python 3 with the required dependencies installed (and Chrome for potential use of a graphical webdriver to scrape the chapter content).
* adater_novelupdates.com: this is the adapter that would need to be added to FanFicFare.

If you are really interested you can try getting this to run, the rough steps are: Install Python 3 and the needed dependencies (preferably in a virtualenv) for newspaper-server.py, then modify FanFicFare to include the linked adapter. Run newspaper-server.py and attempt to download a story using FanFicFare. I want to make it clear that this is not officially supported.

PS: The reason for the external script is that the latest version of the newspaper module dependency requires Python 3; bundling it with FanFicFare (which is what I had in mind initially) would have made it too big.

[mob]

@JimmXinu - thanks for responding to my query and, as I didnt mention this in my previous post, thanks for the plugin and continued development, it opened a completely new world of reading material for me!

@cryzed - thanks a lot for your post but this is unfortunately way over my head technically... Will try to locate the novels in one of the supported sites!

Keep up the good work guys - much appreciated!

PS: Found almost all of them on wattpad ... Problem solved !

[Metaxil]

@cryzed That... Is awesome. I will definitely see about getting it to work. I'm currently away from home and my main computer. I may try it on my laptop, but not 100% sure. It may be a couple weeks. However, I'm really happy to try it out and work with whatever it allows me to download.

Any other personal semi functional adapters for fff that might interest me, or others? Even if it's only semi functional it could be something that I'd be more than happy to use as is. I know just a little programming and can do some minor changes if needed. I am however very computer competent and generally can follow basic instructions or work with them (and Google) to make things work.

[cryzed]

@Metaxil: I'm glad you enjoy it! Most of the adapters I write for my personal use are one-off adapters (usually for generic blogs), however if you enjoy tinkering a bit, I made Faretricks a bit ago.

Faretricks allows you to create rough adapters for many sites very quickly (JavaScript-heavy sites might be an issue) with a bit of input from yourself. Usually you can use these as-is, make small modifications to them to get them to work or even make full-fledged adapters out of them (including scraping all relevant metadata).

You'll have to download it and "pip install" it, and then you can do something like this. The resulting adapter from that process can be found here. It's very likely that you'll have to adjust the regular expression for the site URL pattern for other sites, but most things should just work. I haven't tested it too extensively yet, but it might be just what you are searching for if you are looking for unofficial adapters.

[MCBastos]

I'm having an annoying, intermittent problem for some days now... maybe since the latest official version, but I'm not really sure.
Here's the thing: SOMETIMES, when I'm updating a story from Twisting the Hellmouth, FFF will give me a "login error" message and prompt me for a password.
Now, I DO have my TTH username/password saved in the FFF .ini file. I haven't changed them. And MOST times it does work. Even when it fails, it will succeed if I try again a few minutes later, so the saved password appears to be correct. It's an annoyance, not a deal-breaker.
So now I'm wondering if this is a problem with TTH, with FFF, or with my particular computer (antivirus interfering, maybe?). Another thought that occurred to me is that it might be a latency issue -- since I'm in Brazil, perhaps the connection times out whenever the latency is unusually high.
Has anybody else observed similar behavior?

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by MCBastos

I'm having an annoying, intermittent problem for some days now...
...

Many of the things you suggest are possible, but network latency causing timeouts seems the mostly likely to me if it takes a long time to fail.

If it's failing fairly quickly, then I'd be more inclined to think it might be server load on TtH. If you view the story in your browser right away after it's failed, does it work?

Another possible could be outdated DNS or bad network routes between you and TtH. You could flush the DNS cache on your machine, but other than that, it's not something you can control.

If you can see the issue in your browser, you might be able to report it as a problem to your ISP.

Problems with FFF or AV, I would expect to consistent, not intermittent.