Harry Potter belongs to J.K. Rowling.

Information about the site

Hello!

"Potions, Snitches and Unlikely Relations" is a list of stories that I found mostly on fanfiction.net.

How it all started:

I had a list on a Word document that was about 8 pages long in size 5 font of the Harry Potter stories I was reading. Unfortunately, to my great distress, my computer went crazy and I had to wipe the harddrive... several times.

I was distraught!

I lost that wonderful fanfiction list forever, a list that had taken me a very long time to put together. I resolved that that would never happen again, but how could I be certain? I could save it on disks but I could lose the disks or spill juice on them. Plus, if I used several different disks they all wouldn't be up to date, causing more headaches for me. I decided to archive my list somewhere online, that way I could find the stories I was reading no matter where I was. And so, I tried to collect a list again by looking through my reviews on fanfiction.net. The list was much smaller than the previous one had been, it was missing a lot of stories but it was something and I uploaded it as a very long list online.

After awhile, as I collected more and more stories and organized them better, I realized that most of them were about Snape and Harry in a mentor relationship! Searching the net, I didn't find any archive or site dedicated to this genre so I decided that my site should fill this hole. I started looking through the favourites of authors who had written good stories about that genre and very quickly I had an impressively sized list. I bascially winded through the favourite lists... hopping from one author to another, sometimes checking the favourites of a reviewer I noticed in all the best stories.

By then I had so many stories that I just added them to the list, sometimes without reading them but I trusted the judgement of the person who's favourites I found the stories on, since they either were a great writer or had a list of stories I read and liked. The list had such a volume by then that I had to seperate the stories alphabetically on different pages, I think that there were about 6 pages at that time.

The people who visted my site at this time were mostly people who I talked to regularly who liked the Snape and Harry mentor/fatherson genre. More than half of the hits to my website were myself. :} My site was not on any search engines, no matter how many times I tried to get it on them, so I was pretty comfortable knowing that it was an obscure site and that I wouldn't get critism for anything.

I played around with the list format, expanding it and making it more interesting. I had such a large number of stories and I realized it's potential. I knew that a lot of people loved the Snape and Harry mentor genre and if they could find my site they would probably appreciate it so I worked hard to make it look nice and be unique.

I coded everything by hand (I'm self-taught, I know it shows >.<) and it took forever. Can you imagine sitting hours and hours and hours everyday cutting and pasting code for every single story in your site? ;_; (Yes I know that some people probably do this for a living.) I would work on my website everyday until my hand hurt too much to move the mouse, then I switched and learned how to use my left hand on the mouse (I've gotten really good at it.)! I was really really really upset when fanfiction.net changed all the story urls because I had to change them too! By then I had already decided to update my site with a new list format so I just changed the author urls when I changed the list format. I cannot express the pain and despair I felt when I had to go through the "H" and "T" pages again. I think the T page took like 8 hours to change. I don't remember. I had some people try to help me but they either looked at the code and went "No way!" or got through only 40 stories while I had gotten through 180. It was really my project and I couldn't ask anyone to do it for me. I really really appreciated their attempts and help and the wonderful cheers. (Thanks you guys!) I was pretty much resigned (but still upset!) when fanfiction.net decided to change the author urls as well! >.<

(I still obsess over the site colors and navigation. I am a little stressed out that the site doesn't look the way I want it too on every monitor but I'm trying the best I can. I personally love the colour the site has right now but I might change it later to be more readable for everyone. I keep thinking about the navigation... it's hard to update every single page with a url change so for now I have seperate pages for the links- it will make it easier if/when I ever move the site to another domain.)

At one point, I had wanted to list all the different places a story was archived. Fanfiction.net went offline often and it was always so frustrating to not be able to read fics! If my site had alternative locations than it could be a wonderful resource for all the fanfiction.net blackouts. Unfortunately, after redoing the 'A' page and searching on Google for alternative sites I gave up on this endeavour. It took way too much time to research and I didn't find results for every story.

I started to add more and more stories by going deeper and deeping into the favourites list threads. I made a "Broom Closet" to list all the stories I was collecting so that I could go through them first before adding to my site. I had most of the epic and well-known stories on the list already and I was starting to find some of the less-known stories.

I also started to go through the *gasp* main Fanfiction.net category to find newer stories no one knew about yet. I found it very easy to pick through summaries and find tons that seemed to be about a mentor or father/son relationship between Snape and Harry but it was tough work reading through them all and making sure that that was what they were about. >.< I was starting to upload my site with large clumps of stories and I was spending all my time on that rather than going through the main archive and reading all the stories I had skipped. Those ones were safer, after all, than the new unknown ones I was starting to add by unknown authors. The rotating poll I had up on my site kept sending me the results- people kept saying that the one thing they wanted to see on the site was more stories and I was determined to give them that!

By now I knew that my site was growing and that it could be a great resource to anyone who loved this genre. I had played around with the idea of emailing every author telling them that I had added their story to my site but I kept deciding not to, worrying that they would hate the site or be mad at me or something, I don't know. But now what had started out as "Jan's Personal List Just in Case She Needs to Wipe Her Hard Drive Again" was now "The List of all Snape and Harry fics (and some others besides)" so I felt obligated to tell the authors on my list.

Undoubtedly the authors interested in this genre would want to visit the website... if the 800 or so authors knew about my site and liked it perhaps they would visit it regularly, perhaps this could generate interest in the genre and start a writing frenzy! (I could only hope!)

Maybe with all that interest I could help all the amazing new stories claim instant recognition where otherwise they would have been ignored and unknown and then abandoned! Face it, fanfiction has a pretty poor way of finding good stories and all too often a story is started and then abandoned when it seems no one cares.

Maybe deserted stories would be jump-started and updated!

Maybe. :)

I have plans for this website. I do update it regularly with big clumps of new stories. I wish to create some resource pages... lots of links (as soon as someone goes out and makes some sites about the mentor relationship between Snape and Harry, hurry up already!) ;) and I would like to have a large collection of fanart and pictures from the movies related to this genre. I would love to have some "fun pages" up and informative pages like "What Not to Name Your Fic" or "A Guide to Reviews: What to Write in a Review, and What Your Reviews Actually Mean". I would love to find some way to have all my visitors rate stories too. I feel kind of bad having only my frogs listed as the only way to rate a story since it's my opinions and my opinions alone but I suppose it's better than nothing. Hopefully I'll be able to figure this out sometime, maybe when I learn more about coding.

There are still general stories on the list, 80-90% of the list are about Snape and Harry but because I decided that I couldn't exactly go through the whole site and delete every single story not about them (I haven't read every story and I can't remember every story I read) I decided to just leave them be. Plus, I really liked some of the original general stories and wanted to keep them in my own personal archive. :)

The way the site works:

The main archive is the list of alphabetical pages (ABCDE's ect) and each letter has it's own page except for XYZ since there are so few of them. It would be bad of you to only visit the category pages or the frog pages since not all the stories have been properly sorted and you might miss out on some really great fics. The main archive is the one that I will update the most as it is the base of the entire site.

The category pages are a treat for everyone, listing stories that have to do with a specific genre but they are in no way complete. Don't think that all the Father/Son fics will be on the father/son pages since there may be some hidden ones still lurking in the archive. The genres are also open to interpretation but I hope that I explained how I sorted the stories on the Little pics and Warning page. The category pages really make it a lot harder for me to update the site with updated story info so they probably won't be updated as often as the main site pages (It is difficult to keep track of every single category page a story is on).

Updates: I don't use author alerts, I manually check each story once in awhile... only the stories listed on the "Active Story Page" are checked with any regularity and even then I do not update the main list to reflect the new updates. It would take too much time. I reply on looking through favourites lists (and now C2 groups) and 'word of mouth' for rarely updated stories. Favourites lists on fanfiction.net are sorted by last update so the newer ones are at the top and easy to see.

There are several little pictures/icons that I use to categorize the stories. You can read more about them on the Little Pics and Warnings page.

I can't think of anything else. I hope that that explained everything. If you have any more questions just ask. :)