I have this creative writing website where writing friends can write branching fiction novels together. Sorta like choose-your-own-adventure, but more literary - third person past tense, actual characters and narrative arcs. Configurable number of choices at the bottom of every chapter, and as you're reading, if the choice label doesn't link to a chapter yet, you can write it. It's been floating around since 1996 or so, so my big project lately has been upgrading it. v1 was perl and gdmb files. v2 was php and codeigniter, and it's been limping along there for several years. When ChatGPT came out, I rewrote the whole thing for scala/play and that was super fun. Moved from ubuntu14 to ubuntu20, mysql5.5 to 8.0, etc. I'm done with the rewrite now but am still messing around with launching it, upgrading to ubuntu22 (done today), figuring out if I want to update jvm/scala/play before launching, etc. All this for only a group of six writers (so far)! But collectively we've written more than 425 chapters across a handful of stories, 450,000 words, and had a lot of laughs. I even wrote a snazzy graph visualization thing that animates the structure of the story maps. After I finish launching the thing on hardware/software that actually isn't EOL, I might open up membership to others.
replies(4):