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Archive of erotic pulp fiction (warning: "adult" content)
I’m a little hesitant to post about this site because of the subject matter. However, I thought that the way the site was structured (i.e. an online lilbrary) might be of interest to some people.
Background
The site archives erotic pulps (i.e. x-rated novels) from defunct publishers such as Greenleaf Classics, Liverpool Press and Beeline. They were mainly published in the 1960s and 70s, and coincided with the same relaxation of censorship laws in the United States that gave birth to publications such as Playboy. These pulps have become collectors items, fetching as much as $150 per book!
Screenshot (blurry to protect the innocent – ha ha):
(Why is the screenshot working in preview, but not when I post?)
Site Structure
The 700+ novels are organised using txp’s buit in category mechanism, with cat1 being author and cat2 being publisher. The categories are structured in 3 levels:
author
a
name
name
b
name
... etc
publisher
company
series
series
... etc
Why structure the site this way? There are are a huge number of authors (300+ at last count) and publishers/series and it is simply not feasible to create seperate author accounts and having to log in to the correct one each time a new novel is posted. Also, for accuracy of data entry, picking something from a pop-up category list is way better than having to type entries into custom fields.
Plug-ins
A complete list is available on the site, but the main ones are:
etz_pg: breaks each novel into “chapters”.
stw_category_tree: spits out nested category list for archive by author and publisher pages.
rss_suparchive: spits out nested article listing for archive by date page. If anyone can suggest a way to do this, but with forms support, please help!
zem_cache: used to cache output from stw_category_tree, which is very database intensive given the sheer number of categories.
ako_ifBrowser and ptv_if: used to serve alternate code to IE5 and IE6 because they still do not <expletive> support alpha transparency in PNGs.
Hope this helps someone. Mail me or post a reply if you want more details.
p.s. And yes, before anyone jumps down my throat for this, the site uses a single 3-column table to provide its structure. This is the only instance of mark-up “abuse”, but it was easier than farting around with CSS floats or positioning to get what I wanted. Version 3 of the site will be fully separation-of-structure-and-presentation compliant… :-)
Last edited by neatopotato (2007-09-27 05:15:24)
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Re: Archive of erotic pulp fiction (warning: "adult" content)
(Why is the screenshot working in preview, but not when I post?)
Because alpha-level users have not the corresponding rights to use images. You need a higher title to use images in your posts. Was it Delta and above that have the rights, if I remember corretly…
Cheers!
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Re: Archive of erotic pulp fiction (warning: "adult" content)
when you say ‘authors’ i’m assuming its authors of the novels used for sorting purposes and not actually 300+ people maintaining their area of the site? or do you have some form of moderation set up if its the latter? is each article a ‘book’, and are you just using the regular article image id method to attach the book image(s) to it? either way i’d still be interested in taking a look.
as for your custom field dilemma, not sure if you need it, but as of a few days ago, a new plugin (available via a small donation) called glz_custom_fields allows you to have dropdown/select/radio/etc custom fields now. a future version will even be able to pull specific categories and use them as custom field values.
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Re: Archive of erotic pulp fiction (warning: "adult" content)
Gocom wrote:
Because alpha-level users have not the corresponding rights to use images. You need a higher title to use images in your posts. Was it Delta and above that have the rights, if I remember corretly…
Ah, that would explain it… No mention of it in the FAQs etc. Oh well. Thanks for the info.
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Re: Archive of erotic pulp fiction (warning: "adult" content)
iblastoff wrote:
when you say ‘authors’ i’m assuming its authors of the novels used for sorting purposes and not actually 300+ people maintaining their area of the site? or do you have some form of moderation set up if its the latter? is each article a ‘book’, and are you just using the regular article image id method to attach the book image(s) to it? either way i’d still be interested in taking a look.
Yes, that’s correct. 300+ authors of the novels, for sorting purposes. I expect the list to grow to about 500 over the next year or so.
Each “book” is an article, and broken into “chapters” with the etz_pg plugin.
I use the hak_article_image plugin to associate 2 images (with their thumbnails) to each “book”, so in effect I have access to the covers in up to 4 different sizes per “book” for various purposes. E.g. tiny thumbnail in lists, medium size on front page and link to full size on the book’s page.
I also use the upm_file plugin to associate a zipped copy of each novel on each book’s page for download.
as for your custom field dilemma, not sure if you need it, but as of a few days ago, a new plugin (available via a small donation) called glz_custom_fields allows you to have dropdown/select/radio/etc custom fields now. a future version will even be able to pull specific categories and use them as custom field values.
Sounds interesting – will look into it, and see if it is feasible for a future version of the site. Thanks for the pointer. I wonder if it is feasible to have hundreds of radio buttons because scrolling through the VERY long pop-up menu is really tedious.
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