Ftrain Reader Services

By Paul Ford

A collection of utilities to make reading a given Web site more interesting.

Ftrain Reader Services are currently offline, because they didn't work.

The Ftrain Reader Services toolbar appears on the right of every page on Ftrain.com. At this writing (2002-01-27) reader services is a collection of very simple, primitive, only-slightly-useful functions; with every page view, the reader is told how much he or she has read, the pages he or she has visited most often, and the last pages seen. The reader may also take quick notes (up to 5) on a given page.

These functions should be considered a prototype; eventually this feature set will grow to include more helpful features which might suggest relevant unread sections of the site, help the user navigate through interesting narrative paths, highlight terms, and so forth. The same functionality that is applied in Reader Services can also be used to create a conditional narrative, where the reader sees different pieces of text in a section depending on which sections her or she has already visited. This same functionality allows for a variety of “Interactive Fiction” - style functions, where the reader is only allowed to progress in a narrative if he or she has collected a variety of tokens, etc; it may also allow for fictional characters whose behavior alters depending on which portions of the site have been seen before.