Topped off my story pics yesterday, and the first draft of the story. Should be able to start polishing it up tonight! :)
Also author's note and newbie's guide are updated! I also numbered up the seasons on the round pages. We're currently working through season 12! Lot of story here! :o
And on the topic of all that story... I've been doing a lot of thinking about the story archives lately. And when I have a little more free time this summer, I think I'd like to finally finish cleaning up the older posts, fixing the compressed pictures, maybe rewriting some of the very old stuff. And I was also considering maybe moving all of my gameplay stuff over to this blog.
The reason being, soon enough people aren't going to be playing TS2 anymore. (I know, I know, we all swear we're going to love it forever, lol!) But the point is that some day those gameplay notes aren't going to mean much to anyone anymore. And also, I think all the gameplay notes probably scare off some more mainstream readers (meaning people who don't play Sims) - when really, this story isn't even about the gameplay anymore anyway. So in short, I'd still like the story to stand on its own, and to be readable as a story for a long time to come! As long as I'm around to pay my hosting fees! ;)
So I have a few questions for you (mostly for people who *haven't* followed the story from the beginning):
- When you first started reading, how did you catch up on the story? Did you use the "newer post" links on the bottom? (Those are kind of hard to see, underneath the comments like they are.) Or did you use the story links on the round page? Did you just drop straight in and read backwards as necessary? Or some other means of catching up?
- As you were catching up, did you read the comments, or did you just skip straight to the next story?
- Are the round pages useful at all?
- Do you think a new reader would prefer a "next chapter" link in a more obvious place, like at the end of the post, before the comments? (OMG, that would be a lot of work, lol! But I would do it if I knew people would actually use them.)
- If you were just reading for story, did you find the gameplay notes, author's notes, or outtakes annoying or cluttery? And if so, how did you navigate around them?
And finally - do you think it's easy enough for a new reader to navigate through this story? And is there anything I can do to make it easier?
The round pages were incredibly useful for catching up when I started reading Lakeside Heights! Please don't get rid of them!
ReplyDeleteI caught up by starting at the beginning and reading until (what was then) the present. Didn't read comments to begin, although I did start on the later chapters as I ran out of updates to read! I went back to read comments on the chapters that I really loved. Again, I used the round pages to relocate those.
I found the story pretty simple to navigate through once I grew accustomed to your site. There are so many links it's hard not to find your way around! I wouldn't suggest bothering with a next chapter link for new readers, since it's very easy to navigate by round, storyline or date/archive using your sidebar. That sidebar is a goldmine of LH information!
Thank you Tipix! That's just the kind of thing I wanted to know!
ReplyDeleteNo, I have no intention of getting rid of the round pages, I was just wondering how many people actually used them. I'm very glad to hear some people do! :)
Also edited to add one more question to the list: If you were just reading for story, did you find the gameplay notes, author's notes, or outtakes annoying or cluttery? And if so, how did you navigate around them?
Quite honestly I read the gameplay notes, extra LH info, outtakes, etc. before I read the story. I love seeing how you arrive at the finished product; had a field day reading through your tax system!
ReplyDeleteI mainly used the sidebar to navigate, following links that were present in whatever post I was reading.
I'm not that new to this story any more, but I'll put in an opinion anyway :) . When I find new blogs, I love it when they have some kind of index like your round pages. I can open the page in one tab of my browser and keep it there, opening pages in tabs as I read.
ReplyDeleteI also love gameplay notes... and even if people do stop playing TS2, I'm sure that there are a lot of concepts that are transferable to TS3 or whatever.
Having said that, some gameplay/author's notes do become irrelevant in time. For example, the 'why the next update is taking so long' - type notes that appear in a lot of blogs, are only relevant until the next post finally does appear. So those ones could probably be deleted.
I've found that I really prefer to have the story without big interruptions. I recently discovered another long-running story blog and it was annoying when I was really caught up in the plot, and the next entry was note. Or the next five were, and it had no index page. This is why I'm thinking of starting a babble blog of my own - so long as everything is clearly linked, its the best of both worlds. A reader can open the gameplay pages as they go, or they can read just the story, and read the notes later (or not, as they prefer).
It'd also work for non-sims players - they might read some notes out of curiosity... they might even be tempted to start playing :) But the story will be their main focus, so it's good if that is a stand-alone.
And, I love reading the comments! I love seeing what others say about things I like (I often skim through billions of Amazon.com reviews of favourite books and movies, too :) ), and if they'd thought similar things to me, or things I never would have thought of if someone else hadn't said it. Especially on older posts - speaking for myself here, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who is more reluctant to comment on an older post than a new one, no matter how much I enjoyed it.
BTW, I also use the round pages to find a particular post if I want to refer back to it. Sometimes I remember a particular explanation of a gameplay thing or whatever that came up in the comments of a particular post, for example - if I can vaguely remember who we were talking about and when, I can use the index to find it.
Blackcat, lol! You know, I just went through and deleted all of my "this is why I haven't updated..." posts, dating back forever, and whatever other superfluous babble notes that are no longer relevant.
ReplyDeleteAnd also, for the longest time in LH, I did a really great job of having absolutely no notes at all! It was just one story update to another, to another. (Probably also because I used to tack on superlong notes to the end of each post, which I also want to clean out.) But it wasn't until recently, that because I'd been too busy to get many story updates out, I've been dishing out spam and outtakes and building stuff instead.
I know just what you mean about the clutter when you're really into a story, which is why I'm kind of worried about how much clutter I've spammed my blog with lately, lol! I've run into the same annoyance on other blogs.
And good point about the older gameplay notes, where you'd probably have to search back by who the characters involved were, lol! If I clean those out and move them over to the babble blog, I can title and label them properly, so they're easier to find! :)
I started reading the story relatively recently compared to others. So I'll put in my two cents.
ReplyDelete1. I used the round pages to start reading. I had a feeling that the updates you posted would reference earlier posts which in turn would reference even earlier posts so I might as well just start at the beginning and work my way through to the newest.
2. I read some comments and didn't read others. Depended on what was happening in the story and if there appeared to be much conversation going on in the comments area. I tended to read more on the posts that had more drama and/or conversation in the comments.
3. They were useful when I was catching up. I could more easily remember where I left off. Or at least ballpark where I left off. Like I left off in Spring of X year. Instead of having to remember ok, the Spring of X year was posted in Y month of Z year.
4. It would probably be half and half. The half who read the comments probably don't mind it being where it is. The ones who don't probably only mind it when there is a lot of conversation going on. It didn't really bother me and it beats the next post link being at the top of the page.
5. I found them interesting, but I was reading for a combination of the story and the behind the scenes stuff.
~Seera
I'm not exactly new new either but I just love adding my two cents wherever possible. ;)
ReplyDelete1. When I started reading, I clicked on the very first post in the archive and just kept reading and clicking "next post" until I was caught up. That's what I do with any new Sims story I come across as well (except on Wordpress, which doesn't seem to have a feature like that).
2. I don't think I ever read the comments on older posts. Perhaps occasionally, if something caught my eye or if I was curious about something that I thought might have been addressed. I love comments and I almost always read them normally but when I'm trying to catch up, I don't.
3. For me? No. I don't use them. If I'm catching up on a story, I generally just leave the browser window open at the place I left off or if I have to shut down, I bookmark the exact page.
4. I don't find it much of a trial to scroll all the way down to the "next post" link. People might prefer you to add your own links but I'm comparing all the work it would be for you to to do that to the work it would be for the reader to just scroll down an extra two seconds.
5. I was reading for story and game play but I didn't find any of that stuff annoying or cluttery in the slightest. I read it all and I actually still go back and refer to it occasionally. So if you do get rid of it at LH, it would be very handy to still be able to access it here.
6. Really, I think the most difficult thing for a new reader would be the sheer volume of work they would have to read if they wanted to catch up completely. Once you get past that, I think it's about as clear as it can be.
I am pretty new in reading your blog. I started reading it I think about 1,5 year ago, but then it was so overwhelming to me (so much stories, so much personalities, …) that I gave up. I started reading at your most recent post and linked back with the links you used to hide in every story saying “what happened last time”. This was nowhere near logic for me, because other character would show up that had other things “that happened last time” and I got completely lost.
ReplyDeleteI kinda forgot about your blog for a while (being pregnant an having a baby to look after), but found it again once I was back at work (you’ve got to do something in your break :p). And I remembered that I had loved what I read, but that it was too much.
1. So I used the archives to start at post number 1 en read through every single post until the most recent one. Some I’ve had read before, but started making sense just then.
2. I didn’t read much comments, because the most comments where people saying that they’d liked the update. So no, I didn’t read the comments. I started reading them in the more recent posts, because I started running out of posts to read :p.
3. I LOVE the round pages. I used them to read a story and to get around the gameplaynotes, to refer back to ROS, to see what is coming up next. I look at them pretty regularly, still, I am too curious about everything that is going to come up.
4. For me, I didn’t like the chapters at all. I tried reading by storyline, but to me it didn’t make sense. Because there were other characters with different stories and I completely forgot what happened. I love the story of the neighborhood more than each individual story.
So, probably a new reader might like it, I think it is nice to read a complete story, or to see what happens in one “fase” (a fase being a togetherness of posts, just as your round-pages). But I personally liked the round-pages much more than the chapters.
5. I didn’t find the gameplay notes annoying. I read around them using the round-pages, but mostly I just skipped themin the archives when I was caught up in the story.
I actually really like gameplaynotes (etc), because they give bigger insight in the game. It gave me lot of ideas for my own game and I got to now other websites with interesting downloads and other stuff.
I switched between the story and the gameplay, depending on what I was trying to do with my own game or if I was curious to see how you pulled some things off.
Gameplaynotes are really fun, I think, because they also give some intervention in your reading. I really liked it when you used to put them on the bottom of te posts, these outtakes. It put a link between the story you were telling and the funny behavior of the sims in your game.
6. Navigation is very easy, the only thing that doesn’t work with me are the familytrees. But there are to much characters now anyway for me to remember who is married to who and has children and, … If you write that someone had een grandfather that had 7 children with 3 different wives, I just believe you :p.
So no, I don’t think navigation could be made easier. There are plenty of ways to navigate through your blog and I think that there is a suitable one for everyone.
Thank you for answering these, everyone! This is turning out to be very enlightening and useful! :)
ReplyDeleteSeera, yay, I'm very glad to hear the round pages were useful for you! It's like payoff for all the work it takes to build them, lol! :)
Carla, oh good point - it takes much less work for them to "page down" to the bottom than it does for me to add the links - so decided then, lol!
I know, the volume of reading here. I've toyed with the idea of creating a summary, so that people could jump in sooner. And I still might, possibly to jump to round 2080, since that's where the story really took off anyway, and anything before that was pretty rough reading in terms of storytelling.
But then I figure, if someone wasn't coming here because they enjoyed reading stories, then why would they want to catch up at all? lol! Instead, I think I'll spend most of my efforts on cleaning up those older entries, and making the story and navigation as clear as I can, and hopefully the story is interesting enough to be worth it.
Simphaesis, ha, yes I can imagine people getting lost in the backlinks. I think those story links work best for the more familiar readers to use in finding relevant backstory though - so maybe I should make a note about that in the newbie's guide.
But I'm glad to hear you were able to use the round pages to skip the cluttery stuff when you wanted to! That's just what I was hoping someone might do.
Oh, and sorry to say that the gameplay/outtakes at the bottom of the posts is one of the things I'm planning to edit out, lol! Instead though, I'll have a link to the relevant outtakes over here. I do enjoy doing then, and I enjoy the discussion, but it's just a personal thing, I guess, that I want the story itself and the process to be separated.
Ha, yes, it's probably best you all just take my word for who's related to whom, lol!
I just jumped straight in, I knew I would never have enough time to read back and so I just started from wherever you were back then. I did read some things back, mainly if I was curious about a character or storyline or I had questions. I think I usually just used tag cloud or higlighted things in the actual post.
ReplyDeleteI do read all the game play notes and other things as I find them interesting and they do not clutter your blog in my opinion.