How To Make Your Own Fanfiction Archive, In Just 10 Easy Steps

[melannen]

As the go-to "person who knows about AO3" for quite a few people who read fanfic but aren't really linked-in to wider fandom culture, I've fielded a lot of questions about how to do certain things on AO3 to which my best answer is "you should really start your own archive!" I think, in general, more fans starting their own small archives would be a net good for fandom. AO3 was never meant to be the only archive for all fandom, or even the main archive, and the more spread out and backed up we are the more resilient we are.

But of course I have to be reminded that a lot of fans these days don't really have any idea how little "you should start your own archive!" really involves. (Also, that I should practice what I preach.) So I am now making my own fanfiction archive, and writing up this post as I do it to tell people how to make theirs!

1. Go to https://neocities.org/ and sign up for an account. It only needs a username (which will also be your website address), password, and email. Pick a username that will be related to your archive's title!
   
2. Choose the free account option (if you ever need more than what the free account offers for a text-only archive, you should probably look into graduating from neocities.) This should take you to a menu of "how to make a website" tutorials. You should do them! They're useful skills. But let's get your archive running first.
   
3. Hit the big red Edit Site button, or open the menu under your username and select "Edit Site".
   
4. Select the "Index.html" file to edit. You're now in an HTML Editor. Congrats, you're a web developer c. 1999!
   
5. Find where it has text between the <title> </title> tags. Delete the filler text, and put in the title of your new archive. This text will be what shows on the tab when people go to your archive.
   
6. Find where it has text between the <h1> </h1> tags. This will be big header text at the top of your page. Put the title of your archive here again. If you have no experience with HTML, you should read over the other sample text. It covers the basic basics very well! Once you've done that, you can delete everything else between the </h1> tag and the </body> tag. Save your index.html file.
   
7. Get an HTML file for a fanfic you would like to add to your archive. If it's on AO3, you can use the html download option built into AO3. If you have it as a word processor/google docs file, you should have the option to save as an html file. Save that html file to your computer.
   
8. Go back to Edit Site on Neocities and go to "upload". Find the html file you saved and upload it. (You can also drag and drop files to upload.)
   
9. The file you uploaded should now be showing with your other neocities files. Right-click on the title and select "copy link".
   
10. Go in to edit index.html again. Under where you put your header text, type <br><a href=" and then paste the link you copied. Then type "> . Then put in the title of the fic. Then type </a> . Then save index.html again. It should look like
    <br><a href="http://username.neocities.org/title of page.hml">fic title</a>
    when you're done. Save the page again. You can do this for every fanfic you have.

Congratulations! You now have your very own personal private fanfiction archive that you are 100% in charge of and make all the rules for. It's at least as good as half the ones I was reading on when I started reading fanfiction and will serve its function well as a way to let people read your fic. You can link to it from anywhere you want! (Including your AO3 profile.)

FAQ

But how do I get feedback?
If you use the AO3 downloads, they will include a link to your AO3 comments for the fic. You might also want to include your email or a social media address where people can talk to you somewhere on that page. The tutorials on neocities can show you how! If you want to be very fancy they can even show you how to include a comment form that lets people email you automatically.

How can people find my fic?
You'll have to tell them it's there. Maybe other people will tell them it's there, too! Actually there are lots of ways to make a website easier to find but they're outside the scope of this tutorial (and not necessary if your goal is just to make your fanfic available.)

What if I want to archive other people's fanfic?
You should probably ask them first, it's polite and less likely to get people mad at you. An email along the lines of "Your fic is one of my favorites, and with your permission I'd like to add it to my archive of favorites [link]. I'll make sure you have credit and you can email me if you ever want it taken down." was pretty standard.

But it's your archive, you set the rules. If you have more than one author, make sure you're very clear about which fic is by which author (you can use the <h1> tags to put author names in big letters where their list of fic starts.)

What if I want other people to be able to post their fic on my archive?
A website that lets other people post things by themself suddenly gets way, way more complicated and more likely to go terribly wrong. Don't do this unless you already have a core group of several people who get along and are willing to work together on it, at least one of whom understands moderation and at least one of whom understands databases and at least one of whom understands project management, and are not all the same person. Also, don't try to do it on Neocities - look at Squidge. (But if you see a need for this, ask around! You might be surprised at the skills that are there already.)

If you'd like to be an open archive that collects fics for a certain fandom/pairing/theme/circle of friends/Discord server, etc. you can post some text on the index.html page letting people know that they can contact you if they'd like you to archive their fic, and then they can email you their html files to post.

It's ugly! How do I make it look pretty?
Learn HTML and CSS. The Neocities tutorials are still pretty good! There's lots of other online resources once you exhaust those. But, I mean, nobody is reading your fic just because you have a nice animated gif in the background, I promise.

What if I want to add something else, like warnings or more information about the fandom or fanfic?
Learn HTML and CSS. You can add all kinds of things to the index page, or even have several different indexes! The Neocities tutorials are still pretty good. There's lots of other online resources once you exhaust those.

What about accessibility and stuff?
A bare-bones text-and-links only HTML site like this is probably about as accessible as you can get! No accessibility software should have a problem and it should be highly flexible for all kinds of devices or customization that people need.

I do all my web stuff on mobile, can I still do this?
In theory you should be able to do all ten steps in any mobile browser, and the resulting website should display just fine on one (the monitors html was designed for were often smaller than your phone screen in pixels.) Also, you probably have a local library, educational institution, or business that offers computer access. This should only take an hour or so to set up with a few dozen fics, so that would be fine.

Some of my fic is explicit or contains controversial or copyrighted content, is that ok?
Neocities has a pretty liberal TOS about explicit content and fair use, and I haven't heard anything about them taking content down frivolously, so you're probably ok. Other than Neocities' TOS, it's your site - you can post whatever you want! Yes, even commercial promotion. (But the only way to be sure is to own the servers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)



Anyway, here's my beautiful new fanfiction archive made using this tutorial:

Melannen's Fanfiction Archive

(I am honestly way more disproportionately proud of finally making that than I expected to be. It's nice to have your own archive.)

If you make one, share it in the comments here ! I want to see!

(tumblr version here, except with worse HTML info, because tumblr hates &lt; apparently)

Comments

[tei]

I have a neocities! \o/ https://tei.neocities.org/

I keep meaning to actually finish uploading all my fic there, but a good amount of it is done! Something I really enjoyed about the process of putting my stuff on my own site was that faced with complete, 100% freedom about how to present and categorize work, I actually had a lot of fun figuring out how to do it! I generally dislike the "put your thing in a bucket and it better be the right one or you're letting down The Community" tagging culture on AO3, so have kind of drifted away from tagging descriptively and am using NR/CNTW for a lot more stuff there nowadays. So I thought maybe I just dislike categorization, which made me feel like a bit of a hermit/asshole.

But it turns out that I just don't like the system of sorting fiction into buckets based on the gender of the characters or what they do/don't do with their junk. I LIKE categorizing my stuff when I get to make the buckets myself, and the buckets "stories about death", "stories about music," "humour," "missing scenes," etc., feel much more meaningful and like they're giving information that will actually help someone choose what to read!

[sophia_sol]

Ahhhh I love this, it IS limiting to have to work within the set of buckets that someone else has decided are the Most Important Facets of your work, and I love the buckets you've come up with instead; they do indeed feel meaningful.

[sophia_sol]

ooh thank you for this! I was just thinking recently that as much as I appreciate having ao3 as an archive, I do like the idea of having an archive of MY own, like back in the days of when I first joined internet fandom. Hopefully I will get around to this!

Do you know anything about hosting podfic on a neocities website?

[bluedreaming]

I was curious about that too; my understanding is that if you want to host audio there you’re going to have to pay (and in fact I tested using neocities as an audio host a while back (though my application was a little different), but if you host your audio somewhere else anyway (like if you have filefactory or Dropbox or mediafire or backblaxe etc. or a different archive like the audiofic archive or the internet archive), posting is exactly the same.

[bluedreaming]

This is great! I have such a soft spot for simple websites (yes, I occasionally wax rhapsodical about html that’s so simple it’s practically poetry).

Do you happen to know of any tools that will create epubs from a page (like technically it would be possible to upload an epub for download, but then editing the html file would necessitate editing the epub as well)? I know of dotepub.com but it does have its limitations.

[melannen]

I love simple websites! html is so elegant and so well-designed for putting out formatted content in a way that lets parsers display it however works best for them. CSS ruined the web.

I've only used epub converters though Calibre I think, sorry, and don't have any recs. For Neocities I don't think they host epubs on free accounts either, though, which is why I assumed html for the tutorial.

[tptigger]

Hi there. Will neocities let me upload the html files I have from back when my fic lived on my own site?

[melannen]

Yup! It will let you upload any html files, as long as they only need html/javascript/css. I used the AO3 ones just because I'm lazy and threw this together fast. If you still have old backup files from a web 1.0 website hanging around, you should be able to upload them wholesale and it will just work.

Once I've dug it out I will definitely be uploading the old html file I have with all my drabbles from lj drabble coms indexed on it.

[seekingferret]

Beautiful archive!

[melannen]

Thank you! Very proud of my design work.

[kore]

WEBRINGS OMFG

I love the idea up there of "an archive of MY own." That's really appealing right now especially!

[melannen]

When I checked, anarchiveofmyown.neocities was still available!

Though what I would really love is for OTW to start a new project to build small-scale, truly open-source automated archiving software from scratch, to give to fans. They should save the name for that.

[ratcreature]

But how do I get feedback?

The answer to that is "You don't." in my experience.

I've never stopped having my own website and it offers a mail address to write me, but the only time anyone ever mailed me about my art in now 25+ years, was somebody wanting to use my fanart on a stupid commercial thing of theirs without paying me. So I just had to tell them they should use their own fanart to get sued by Lucas Film (that was before SW was Disney).

Granted I don't push asking for feedback, but in my experience you don't get any engagement.

(I don't have an icon that says "the lurkers don't support me in email" which would be more fitting...)

[kalloway]

In my experience, and having tried various guestbook/webform/etc. methods over the years, mostly I got spam and maybe three or four comments per year. This probably bothered me back then, but I was also posting to mailing lists/BBs/LJ/etc. and was getting the feedback there before adding it to my site in final, archival form. (Or something.)

I wouldn't mind a return to a lot of active smaller communities, either on DW or discords or whatever. Or an addition of them, I suppose.

(I have comments off on most of my AO3 stuff anyway - I'm bad at replying to comments + generally by the time I've archived it, my brain is done with it. A comment on something I wrote last week might get me able to say something intelligent in response but a comment on something from twelve or twenty years ago just makes me blue screen all "what even was that one? glad they liked it? I guess?" - being able to cut out the awkwardness is actually pretty nice.)

[dhampyresa]

Ooh, neat!

[melannen]

Thanks!

[extrapenguin]

I made one! I'm probably going to fill in the art section first + my singular IF, as they're smaller and faster to do, then figure out how much of my fic I want to upload and how to categorize it.

[mekare]

Oooooh wait, how did you do this with the imported AO3 art?
ETA: I didn‘t read the whole tutorial, found it now. Though ideally I would still like to put my art on there in a table as opposed to 100 individual html sites.

I‘ve made my own neocities this weekend and tried to upload my jpg files and tried to display them the normal way (img src), but they don‘t show up.

[ehyde]

Thanks for the guide! My archive is here https://ehyde.neocities.org/writing I got myself a neocities account back in November but I hadn't done anything with it until now. I'm planning on having it be more than a fic archive, but fic is what I'm motivated to work on right now.

[melannen]

I like the formatting of the fanfic part! Looks really elegant.

[shipperslist]

Thank you for this! I also now have a spanking new archive. 😁

[melannen]

Awesome! Way shinier than mine.

[scytale]

Here via vriddy's link, and thank you for this! The resulting fanfic archives are so satisfying to look through; it's been really satisfying seeing your and other people's personal archives and the different styles and methods of organization.

One thing I want to note is that with this archive setup, the fic will be scrapable by AI by default (AO3 recently changed to disallow Common Crawl, which is one of the main sources for generative AI, so this is a change from posting fic on AO3).

People who want to disable the crawling will have to create a robots.txt plain-text file, containing something like:

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

(with the caveat that I'm not an expert in webdev, and I didn't double check this!)

[bluedreaming]

Oh yes I did this to stop search indexing but I should check abut scraping 🤔

[beatrice_otter]

Psst, one of the links to a fic doesn't work: https://melannen.neocities.org/A%20Nightingale%20Sang%20In.html

[firecat]

Thank you for this. These efforts to bring back Web 1.0 delight me! And I agree that redundancy is a good idea. Signal-boosted here https://firecat.dreamwidth.org/1626759.html

[silveradept]

Thank you for the tutorial. I've been using Neocities in a professional manner for years at this point, and it works really well for the simple things that I want to do with it. It would very much translate well to fanfic archives, and linkages across various parts of it is great, and I wouldn't be surprised if the people in charge of Neocities are secretly thrilled that people might be using the space in this regard.

[pebbleinalake]

Thank you for making this tutorial! I'd vaguely heard of neocities before but didn't know much about it and had never truly considered the idea of making a personal website for hosting my fanfics. Then I read your post a few weeks ago and immediately signed up for a neocities site. It's still very much a work in progress but it's coming along and I just wanted to thank you for making this post and making people aware of this option. Without your tutorial, I never would have given it a try. Thank you!

Get Authors' Explicit Permission First Before Reposting Their Works

[(Anonymous)]

For the love of fandom, for appreciation of the writers who are devoting their time, hearts, and energies to writing these stories, please do not ever post other writers' works without their explicit permission. In a hundred years, sure. But if the writers are still out there, don't repost without permission. It's theft. If you love the story, if you love the way writers share their hearts and thoughts and ideas, don't punish them by ripping off their work and reposting unless they give you explicit permission to do so.

Re: Get Authors' Explicit Permission First Before Reposting Their Works

[femboy]

Neither the creator of this tutorial nor the people in the comments, who are all fan creators with works of their own, are suggesting to do any of what you wrote.

[le_gaosaure]

I've been wanting to do that for a while but with the recent attack on AO3 (that happened on the same day I had two other websites I use die on me, so I was very much in a "I'm gonna percussive maintenance this tech if that's what it takes" mood, so writing HTML and CSS was close enough lol) I finally did it x')

LeGaosaure's Archive

Now I just need to... upload my backlog... I only put the fics from this year so far but I have around 125 more... send help... (I also need to figure out how I'll deal with chaptered works and series but uh that's a problem for later I guess.)

[dawen]

...This is super neat! I appreciate that you have an example site so we can see how the fic will look on it; I also find it super fascinating/interesting/reassuring that the archived fics look like the PDFs I download from AO3. It makes sense in hindsight; all that formatting must be encoded in the html file that gets uploaded.

Anyway. This is rapidly increasing my desire to try a Neocities site.

[heimeydinger]

> dont try it on neocities

but thats all i got ;w; but i do know theres other places similair to neocities like fc2 and a site that claims the genocities domain now but i lost it. but someone moved their site from neocities to over there when i was exploring around last year.

neocities tho is strange in terms of more wider scale fanfic archive projects like this bec while its rumored to be unmonitored (kinda true. i see literal white supremacists and covid-denying conspiracy theorists on there with their sites still up to this day. there even used to be a kid who had an image the columbine shooters' corpses on there, but the site is gone NOT because of moderation but bec they got harassed offline. so in terms of doing anything on there is kind of no joke)

ive also seen people try to make projects in the past with neocities, like imageboards. theres also a site thats still up thats literally just a chatroom. sure it has other stuff on it but the existence of that space is for people to talk in. Im 99% sure thats still up i just forgot the url.

so you CAN do webprojects as such on there, its just that most are gone mainly due to the community (people not behaving themselves) along with other smaller issues like the limits of doing it on a static, free web hosting site where you basically gotta Frankenstein everything together with stuff you'd get from other websites and embedding it into your code. i just wouldnt depend heavily on neocities if you cant afford individual hosting right now (or figure out how Squidge works I'm very nervous), as they also tend to delete sites at random from what ive heard. so back your stuff up and make a mirror on other similair sites like fc2, though that place is mostly japanese based, and also fairly unmoderated. But when having an adult website (a literal option), they want your ID and other documents to know that you're an adult. And i believe the limit is 21+ but I am unsure I forgot as well.

this is most likely due to Japan's laws. But i've been snooping around fc2 for a while where its practically dead and a lot of its free services are being clogged up with strange forums, sites, n blogs that i feel like would've gotten taken down but aren't and spam ad stuff, some even advertising adult products. so yeah. make with what you will with that

[obstinatecondolement]

This is very inspiring! I am tempted, I must say...

[obstinatecondolement]

So I just went ahead and made a simple site and got started porting some stuff over, haha.

[stel]

i know this is a bit of an old post, but it encouraged me to start my own fic archive! i wanted to add that for people who are more comfortable with web-devvy stuff and static site generators, tencurse made a very nice starter for 11ty, which is what i use for my site ^_^

[le_gaosaure]

I saw Tei already posted about their fanfic archives webring in the comments here (but it never hurts to link again ;p), so I'm adding another option for people who want their archive to be more easily found: fan archives directory! Joining either (or both) of these should be easy enough to be tackled by website beginners =)

Archive Template

[osteophage]

In case anyone is interested, I created a webpage template called Archive of Your Own that lets you set up AO3-style filters with CSS. I recommend it for folks who've at least looked at CSS before, but there are instructions written in to explain how to use it.

[randomarceus]

Thank you for this!