Index : What is Jaffis? · First Things First · Doing a Fanfiction.Net Search · Fanfiction.Net Updates · Global Filters · Skeletons · Downloading Fanfics and Updating Them · Fimfiction.Net · An Archive of Our Own

What is Jaffis?

Jaffis is a program I've written that is intended to help in looking for and downloading fanfics. It is a successor to an earlier program that I first started when the search engine for Fanfiction.Net was completely useless.

The core functions of Jaffis are search tools for Fanfiction.Net, Fimfiction.Net, and Archive of Our Own, which download all the fanfic index pages (one by one) in the selected categories, filters them according to the specifications that the user picks, optionally sorts them into result categories, and displays them in the results. You can save the search, and for Fanfiction.Net, the results, and have the program produce formatted HTML files of the results.

Although this much slower than using the working search engines these sites have, Jaffis is far more flexible and sophisticated. For exapmle, Fanfiction.Net does not allow looking for keywords in the title or summary at the same time, cannot filter by word count or completion status, cannot search by looking at the character info, and will not allow you search in more than one specific category, all of which can be done by Jaffis. Jaffis has several more filtering options, and the result categories means you can do multiple searches on the same category at the same time, and save the results for browsing and (for Fanfiction.Net) updating.

In addition to the search tools, Jaffis currently also includes:

A front end for Google, which allows you to launch a search and filter (and sort) the results, the same way you can for Fanfiction.Net.
A download tool for fetching Fanfics from several (currently 5) fanfiction sites for offline reading.
An update tool for the downloaded fanfics which can be used to update all the downloaded fanfics in a particular directory.

Please keep in mind this program was (and is being) developed primarily for personal use, and thus cannot really be considered to be professional quality software. It works, but it is somewhat buggy, and will probably crash if the user does something unanticipated. Also, the input data — websites — is something that the program has no control over. If the the formatting for the targeted webpages changes, the program will likely crash, and a revised version will have to be produced.

First Things First

Before doing any searches or downloads with Jaffis, there are 2 main things that should be done.

Set up the directories

Picture of Tools and Settings Menu From the Tools and Settings menu, pick the option called Default Settings. This will pop up the dialog you see on the right.

The most important thing there is the list of directories, which specifies the default directory for 6 specific things:

Google Results : Where formatted HTML results of Google searches will be placed.
Google Save Files : When a Google search is saved, the default directory where the file will be saved is this one.
Search Results Where formatted HTML results of searches will be placed.
Save Files : When a search or a Fanfiction.Net results collection is saved, the default directory (where the file will go to) is this one.
Downloaded Fics : When you download a fanfic, by default, the fic will go here (or in a subdirectory).
Default Open Directory : When you want to open a saved search or a results file, the file open starts from this directory.

You can use the Pick buttons to the right of each of those to bring up a directory picking dialog to change them. You could also type in the directories manually.

The other two things in the dialog are:

Default filesize hint : When downloading fanfics, sometimes packing all parts into a single file can result in a file that inconveniently large — browsers can sometimes freeze for minute or so while rendering such a large amount of text, especially if you are trying to view the fic on a PDA or something similar. So this number is a hint as to the maximum file size Jaffis should have for a downloaded fic. Anything requiring more will end up as multiple files.
Do Logging : Not useful for users, but rather for me: if checked at program start, Jaffis will output a logfile, trace0.txt where the programs writes statements indicating what is is doing internally. If Jaffis crashes, I can examine the file to try and figure out where and why the crash occurred.

Once done, click on the Save and Close Button. The information is saved to (and loaded from) the globalvals.dat when Jaffis closes (and starts).

Get Category information

Picture of Fanfiction.Net Category downloader

Picture of AO3 Category downloader For a Fanfiction.Net search, or an Archive of Our Own search, you have the pick the categories to look in. Fanfiction.Net has 9 sections, which often contain hundreds of categories each, and far more complexly, you have the crossovers, where a popular show alone can have hundreds of sections for crossover fics. These categories are added to on a regular basis. To make sure the listings of categories to search in are reasonably up to date, pick Fanfiction.Net Categories from the Tools and Settings menu.

This brings up the dialog you see to the right. Click the Start button to start downloading the Category info. This could take quite a while. This should also be repeated now and then before doing a search because Categories are always being added.

For Archive of Our Own, the process is similar, but since that site does not have a vast array of crossover categories, the download is simpler and much faster.