FA+
Shop
On My Absence & Writing Backlog
11 months ago
I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately! Honest! I just have been extremely lazy about posing it to all the places that y’all want to read it. Why? Because it’s actually a pain in the butt to cross-post a story to multiple websites. With visual art, a picture is a picture, regardless of format, and PostyBirb is sufficient to enable easy cross-posting. For a writer, though, it’s not nearly that simple.
My preferred writing tool is Obsidian, which allows me to write with Markdown formatting and, crucially, link pages together in my personal vault. This is an invaluable way to link a story to its notes and any other assets that go along with it. Unfortunately, Markdown isn’t universally supported. I can use it on Weasyl, SubscribeStar, Mastodon, and Discord; I can’t use it on FurAffinity, SoFurry, InkBunny, or Telegram. If I want to have the story appear with its proper formatting on all sites and minimize the number of versions I have to post, it still turns into a heck of a production.
Once I finish editing a story and it’s ready to post, here’s what all I have to do.
• Export the story as a PDF and as HTML.
• Copy the Markdown file, remove any frontmatter, and rename it to a TXT file.
• Make a story thumbnail using Krita. I have a template so this only takes a couple minutes.
• Post the story and its thumbnail to SubscribeStar Adult. The way PostyBirb handles SSA sometimes mangles text formatting in ways I can’t fix.
• Post the story to my early access channel on Discord. PostyBirb works here, at least.
• Use the PDF in PostyBirb to post to FurAffinity and SoFurry. The HTML version of the story gets added to the description on FA and the fallback text used on SoFurry.
• Use the TXT in PostyBirb to post to Weasyl and InkBunny.
• Confirm that I want to use the thumbnail I provided on Weasyl.
• Copy the BBcode from FurAffinity into the story text on InkBunny. Yes, really. This is actually necessary.
• If posting to Mastodon, copy the Markdown and paste it into the site(s) I’m posting to. PostyBirb doesn’t format Mastodon posts since formatting isn’t vanilla behavior.
• Collect the links from the various sites that the story was posted on.
• Post to my Telegram channel with the links to the story.
• Post to various self-promotion channels on Discord with links to the story.
• Hope that I haven’t somehow missed a step along the way and nervously recheck everything to ensure it was all done properly.
So, there you have it. Posting a picture to half a dozen pages takes just a few moments, depending on how thoroughly I tag and describe it. Posting a story to the same number of sites is a 15+ minute ordeal that involves a lot of manual, error-prone steps. I’d welcome any improvements to that workflow, because it is genuinely a big part of why I haven’t kept up with posting stories despite having nearly a dozen in my backlog now. Otherwise, I’m just going to have to power through, get things scheduled, and at least take some solace in knowing I’ll have posts up for most weeks remaining in the year.
Posted using PostyBirb
My preferred writing tool is Obsidian, which allows me to write with Markdown formatting and, crucially, link pages together in my personal vault. This is an invaluable way to link a story to its notes and any other assets that go along with it. Unfortunately, Markdown isn’t universally supported. I can use it on Weasyl, SubscribeStar, Mastodon, and Discord; I can’t use it on FurAffinity, SoFurry, InkBunny, or Telegram. If I want to have the story appear with its proper formatting on all sites and minimize the number of versions I have to post, it still turns into a heck of a production.
Once I finish editing a story and it’s ready to post, here’s what all I have to do.
• Export the story as a PDF and as HTML.
• Copy the Markdown file, remove any frontmatter, and rename it to a TXT file.
• Make a story thumbnail using Krita. I have a template so this only takes a couple minutes.
• Post the story and its thumbnail to SubscribeStar Adult. The way PostyBirb handles SSA sometimes mangles text formatting in ways I can’t fix.
• Post the story to my early access channel on Discord. PostyBirb works here, at least.
• Use the PDF in PostyBirb to post to FurAffinity and SoFurry. The HTML version of the story gets added to the description on FA and the fallback text used on SoFurry.
• Use the TXT in PostyBirb to post to Weasyl and InkBunny.
• Confirm that I want to use the thumbnail I provided on Weasyl.
• Copy the BBcode from FurAffinity into the story text on InkBunny. Yes, really. This is actually necessary.
• If posting to Mastodon, copy the Markdown and paste it into the site(s) I’m posting to. PostyBirb doesn’t format Mastodon posts since formatting isn’t vanilla behavior.
• Collect the links from the various sites that the story was posted on.
• Post to my Telegram channel with the links to the story.
• Post to various self-promotion channels on Discord with links to the story.
• Hope that I haven’t somehow missed a step along the way and nervously recheck everything to ensure it was all done properly.
So, there you have it. Posting a picture to half a dozen pages takes just a few moments, depending on how thoroughly I tag and describe it. Posting a story to the same number of sites is a 15+ minute ordeal that involves a lot of manual, error-prone steps. I’d welcome any improvements to that workflow, because it is genuinely a big part of why I haven’t kept up with posting stories despite having nearly a dozen in my backlog now. Otherwise, I’m just going to have to power through, get things scheduled, and at least take some solace in knowing I’ll have posts up for most weeks remaining in the year.
Posted using PostyBirb
Did you know you can support me on SubscribeStar Adult? 
I'm afraid I might not have any useful suggestions for improving your posting workflow. The only place I could offer anything is in the initial conversion between formatting tags. A while back, I wrote a Windows PowerShell script to automatically convert BBCode tags into Markdown tags. It would probably be pretty quick to modify it to go the other way: Markdown to BBCode. But I'm not sure if that's anywhere near the most time-consuming part of the workflow you described above. The posting process itself seems to be the bigger issue. Plus, this script needs to be run from the PowerShell terminal anyway, which may or may not be a barrier. The main place it saves time is if you have a big backlog of stories you need to batch-convert all at once.
If it's any consolation, posting a picture to a few sites takes me 15+ minutes rather than a few short moments. Tagging something in a useful way on e621 is always going to be more thorough than posting a story, for me. I don't need to tag visual qualities like "yellow_scales" and "blue_scales" on a story, but I do that for findability on e621 [and these tags implicate the more general "yellow_body" and "blue_body"]. People sometimes remember and search for details like the colour of a character in a picture they liked, but not the species. So these things are important to tag if you want e621 to be a useful resource for finding your visual work there. And it just takes a while.
Since I’m running Linux these days, a PowerShell script is not helpful. PostyBirb automatically handles that conversion when I’m posting formatted text in the description of an FA or E621 submission. Since I need to make an HTML version for SoFurry anyway it doesn’t take any extra work to get the formatted text on FA. Copying it from FA to InkBunny is thus kind of an ugly hack that saves some work.
I, for one, appreciate you being so thorough with tags. I do try to be thorough about them as well, but I rarely take more than a few minutes when tagging things. Maybe I just have a tendency to think in those tags automatically after so many years on the site; maybe I’m just a very quick typist who takes advantage of autocomplete. I guess it just goes to show that different people find different parts of the process to be time consuming.
But yeah -- the main thing that makes e621 uploads slower for me is consulting the wiki. I'm often checking tag descriptions and implications that way. I'll give two quick examples.
A drawing I recently uploaded has a position that I would ordinarily call "doggystyle". But after consulting the wiki, I realised that e6 guidelines would have me refer to it as "speed_bump_position" because the bottom was lying on the floor rather than supporting himself on all-fours.
Then secondly, I was recently thinking of tagging an image "inviting_sex" since that tag appeared on the upload form's autocomplete. But after consulting the wiki, I saw the tag was an orphan. It did not have any of the implication relationships you might expect -- like "inviting" -- and that led me to conclude that it was probably not a very good tag to use. After all, it's generally hard to discern whether someone is inviting sex or inviting other forms of intimacy under tag-what-you-see guidelines.
These are problems of my own making, since I'm repeatedly choosing to investigate tags that I'm less familiar with! But it does make the process slower for me. xD