see you at the equator

hi!! thank you so much!! I hope it's ok I'm answering this publicly, I just thought it would be best to make all the resources/etc public since I've gotten this question a few times!

I put all the resources I used to code media circus/related social media fics in a bookmark collection on ao3. I always link this collection in the author's note at the end of each chapter/fic that utilizes those resources, but I'll include the link here as well for easy access: HTML/CSS Resources.

If you want to learn about coding in general on ao3, this is the best resource I can think to direct you to: Coding Encyclopedia. It starts from the very basics and then gradually gets into more complicated code; starting from the basics is super useful if you're coding for the first time!

I'm not sure what specific aesthetic you're going for for your news articles, but here are some tutorials/some code that might be useful to you:

How to Make Newspaper Articles on Ao3

Newspaper/Magazine Article Template

Mock News Site

In general, my biggest recommendation is to start small and borrow code from others (only those who have willingly shared their code, of course! Thankfully there are tons of tutorials on ao3 such as the ones I linked!) Coding anything will ALWAYS lead to unexpected bugs and headaches no matter what you do or how experienced you are (esp when you're working with ao3, which loves to break code). If you start too ambitious you're just going to burn yourself out and make yourself upset. Just to give you a frame of reference for what the coding process is like: it took around 40 hours to code chapter 4 of media circus alone, and most of that was spent troubleshooting random bugs that made me want to pull out my own hair. I've been coding HTML/CSS fics on ao3 for nearly a year at this point and I'm only just now getting to the point where I feel comfortable coding everything on my own, without starting from a tutorial/referencing someone else's code. Also, if you start by just coding what you're comfortable with, it'll be easier to understand how the code works, which will make it easier to troubleshoot when issues come up.

Some more practical tips/resources:

If you're writing your own code from scratch, I recommend writing everything out in plain text first, and then gradually adding html tags one at a time

I write all my new code "templates" in CodePen - you can immediately see the changes you made to the code in the preview window which is very helpful!

I draft my fics in plain text in a word processor first, then code them in Visual Studio Code

Please please please remember to save your fic as a draft and review it in ao3 first before posting! And make sure to check on both desktop and mobile! Even if the code looks great in CodePen/other platforms there's still a chance ao3 will break the code

Also remember that ao3 only allows limited CSS so I recommend sticking to coding tutorials that are specific to ao3 since those will take the limitations into account

If you have any questions down the road I'm happy to help as best as I can! It's difficult for me to troubleshoot others' code sometimes because my troubleshooting technique for my own code is basically "try a bunch of random stuff and see what works" lol, but I will do what I can!

(And yes, the next chapter of media circus is over halfway done! Writer's block has really been getting me but I'm hoping to get it out very soon!)

An HTML/CSS choose-your-own-adventure Markhellyna story