Make sure you never miss new fanfiction: thumbtack!

(I keep forgetting to make this post. Whenever I mention this particular use of the thumbtack to someone, invariably they had no idea that it existed, and I say to myself, "Self? I should post about that!" and then I don't. Too bad there's no thumbtack for your brain.)

Many of us have probably said this to ourselves while reading fanfiction on livejournal or dreamwidth: "Self, I really like this piece of fanfiction. I would probably like to read more of what this author writes. However, I don't know this person at all / I feel weird 'friending' someone just for their fanfiction / even if I used filters I'd still have to refresh all kinds of things in case I'd missed something / etc." And then many of us forget that we'd had this conversation with ourselves, and wind up stumbling across the last three chapters of a multi-chapter story we had lost track of, only to discover that it had been finished and posted months ago, or we 'friend' someone and skim past their entries on our flists every day unless it's clearly fanfiction, and then sometimes it's not in our fandom, and blah blah blah.

Yes, we all have drastic First-World problems. There should be an organization that collects paper-clips and pop-tops for us.

But there is a solution. Just like you can follow a discussion by using the thumbtack, or just follow responses to one comment by using the thumbtack, you can follow a single tag by using the thumbtack, too.

Hey, here's an example!

I don't know lightgetsin. Never even seen the name around, which is really hard to believe (though, from a brief skim of her lj, I have discovered that we have cmshaw in common... and doesn't that sound fun!). BUT! movies_michelle just recommended lightgetsin's two White Collar stories, A Sure Thing and Figure It Out (btw, if you are a White Collar OT3 fan, Figure It Out is hot like something that is something other than burning because that's getting old but nobody's come up with a new catchphrase yet and I'm not gonna try to do it on the fly).

Now, let's say I don't have time to even read the flist I have now, and not only am I not adding people, but I'm also cutting big chunks of it (none of this is true, btw). Still, I do want to read all the White Collar Peter/Elizabeth, Peter/Neal, and Neal/Peter/Elizabeth that I can get my hands on. So, I go to one of the stories' entries, and click on the thumbtack. This takes me to a page that asks me what, exactly, I want the thumbtack function to do--notify me any time someone comments on the entry I'm reading, and/or any time lightgetsin posts anything at all, and/or any time lightgetsin posts anything with a certain tag (her tags appear in a drop-down menu). It also asks me if I want notification through my lj inbox, or through email, or both.

TAG!

Wahoo! I will now get email the moment that lightgetsin posts anything with the "fic white collar" tag.

And hey, who knows? In time, it's possible that lightgetsin and I will get to know one another through comments and responses and chatting about White Collar and sharing cmshaw / drunken text-messaging / crashing the White Collar sets / whatever, and I'll say to myself, "Self? I think lightgetsin and I have progressed past the I-only-love-you-for-your-fiction stage. We have learned. We have grown. We have spent twenty-four hours in the same jail cell. Perhaps it is time we became lj-friends."

Or maybe we won't -- but I'll always know when she posts stories.

Oh, uh, naturally this works for, you know, all tags, so, if there's other random shit you read people's journals for, you can tack those tags, too.

(P.S. Obviously this only works if the poster uses tags. If the poster doesn't--me, for example--well, sucks then.)

(P.P.S. I'm gonna get right on creating a bunch of tags and back-tagging all of the entries in my livejournal. Soon.)

(P.P.P.S. That was a joke, son.)