Letters App

[karanguni]

Hello, Yuletide!

I'm de-anoning as the coder behind the letters app here so that people can easily post corrections and ask for updates in the lull between now and Madness.

Of course, the original Dear Yuletide Writer and spreadsheet post is where you should start if you want to get your letter listed; the app will be updated per that post, including all corrections.

App-specific fixes: please comment on the corrections comment on this post if you see any fixes (tagset, letter links, prompts, bugs) that need to be made.

If reporting that a Letter has migrated into the Characters column for a prompt, please provide me with the fandom name and username!

[edit] Donate: if you want to help out with hosting fees, that's always appreciated! The app costs $25/month in the high season and a lot of love to run :) https://ko-fi.com/karanguni

How To Use The App

The app provides you with the entire Yuletide 2017 tagset.

• The Characters column contains all nominated characters for that fandom.
• The Letters column contains letters that were posted to the spreadsheet post. It is not comprehensive.
• Once Madness opens, the Prompts column will allow you to load all prompts for a given fandom. Prompts are organised alphabetically by username.

User Interface

By default, the app loads 100 rows at a time to prevent your browser from collapsing under the sheer weight of all the expectations of all the fandoms all the time. Scroll down to load more, or check the Load All option. Give your browser time to render if you do that.

Bookmarks are in the upper right.

There is a Jump to Top (^) helper link in the lower right.

• Filter by Fandom: search by fandom name. Takes into account accents on words, but is case insensitive.
• Filter by Category: what it says on the tin
• Only Fandoms with Prompts: filters down to only fandoms with prompts (visible once Madness opens)
• Only Bookmarked Fandoms: what it says on the tin
• Only Fandoms with Letters: filters down to only fandoms with letters from the letters post. This does not indicate there are no letters in the actual prompts
• Hide Characters: hide the characters column
• Hide Category: hide the category column

Bookmarking

Bookmarking fandoms, letters, or (after Madness opens) prompts will save them to the bookmarks tab in the top right corner of the app. Your bookmarks are saved in your browser history, meaning as long as you don't clear your cache or are in incognito, they should persist even if you refresh the page.

Fandoms can be bookmarked by clicking the Bookmark link. Letters and prompts can be bookmarked using the heart (♥) symbol.

(Post-Madness) Looking Up Prompts By User

Any username in any Prompts table will have a (see all) link next to it. This will open up all of the given user's prompts in a tab on the upper left.

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Contributing

Other development: In the hope of making this useful for Madness (and the future?), I've put the code and a roadmap of features that will be added here on Github. Everyone is welcome to comment on what should be added next.

Please sort by Milestone on the Github issues page to see when something is slated to go up.

Current milestones:

• Pre-Madness: any changes between now and Nov 1
• Madness: changes for Nov 1, including adding all the requests
• 2018 Rampup: potential stuff for next year

Suggesting Features: Just leave a comment here and I'll get it added to the issues list.

Helping Out: If you would like to help code, please fork and open up a PR (you might want to wait till I finish pre-madness issues first). :) If you would like to help add letters to the app, feel free to do so at any time: it has never been locked down.

Comments

Corrections Comment

[karanguni]

Any corrections/bugs here, please!

Re: Corrections Comment

[mlravenwrites]

Someone added naemi's letter to Grace and Frankie (TV), but they didn't request that fandom.

Re: Corrections Comment

[karanguni]

Removed!

Re: Corrections Comment

[shifty_gardener]

I entered the incorrect username for someone's letter - could you change "anzunagi" to "acalmingcupoftea" in the four instances it appears, please?

Re: Corrections Comment

[karanguni]

Done!

On 22 October 2017 at 23:43, shifty_gardener - DW Comment < dw_null@dreamwidth.org> wrote:

Re: Corrections Comment

[shifty_gardener]

Thanks! From your hands flows gold unmeasured.

[meretricula]

you are an actual angel and we love you, coadie <3

(I have no suggestions, just wanted to voice my appreciation)

[rosehiptea]

That is extremely awesome. Thank you so much.

[rosefox]

Thank you so much for this app; it's really easy and pleasant to use and made sign-ups much much easier!

[zdenka]

Thank you, the app is great!

[yhlee]

You are the best, coadie! The app is so useful.

(Thanks also to the spreadsheet volunteers!)

[htbthomas]

This is an invaluable resource, thank you so much for all the time and effort you are putting into it!

[moetushie]

OMG, coadie! <3

Thanks for your hard work!

[sailor]

coadie, you're my hero ♥

[ceb]

Thank you for your efforts! It's a nice app :-)

[rocknroll1968]

Really useful! Thanks!

[ambyr]

The app was great! If you can do the signup summary scraping that I see you've already discussed trying on GitHub, that would make it even better for 2018.

[kore]

Thank you so much for this app, it's AMAZING.

[florianschild]

This app is *awesome*! I'll definitely look into contributing. Thanks for open-sourcing. :)

[thisisthemorning]

Coadie, you're the best <3

[eirenical]

Coadie, I'll say it again, you're AMAZING. Thank you so much for doing this! ^_^

[summerstorm]

MARRY ME

[eustacia_vye28]

This is amazing, thank you!

[dhampyresa]

This is super useful, thank you!

[swan_tower]

Thank you so much for having created this! My thought process this Yuletide has gone like this:

"Ugh, I'm so busy with work. I don't know if I'll be able to write anything more than just my assignment."

"But you've always written treats! Every year!"

"Yeah, but . . . I should focus on work . . . and going through looking for treat prospects is so labor-intensive, before I even get to the part where I write them."

"Waitasec -- isn't there some nifty new tool for looking at prompts? Maybe that would make it easier."

"Okay, fine. I'll take a look at it."

And lo, I have a list of possible treats, with like 1/1000th the effort it took me in the past. So thank you!