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By far the easiest source to find rec sites is Fanlore, where there are 255 listed at time of writing (though not all of those met my guidelines). I love love love to rec Fanlore, it seriously appeals to my inner fandom nerd. I even got to make my first edit to a Fanlore page by finding a URL for one of the sites!

Next most common was going to the links pages of those sites themselves. I usually couldn't get many at a time like this, but it added up. Special kudos to Justacat's Slash Resource Site, though, I must've gotten over 100 rec sites from their listings.

Then, I started using Google. Normally you'd think that'd be the first option, right?! Even though it was super easy to navigate, so many of these old sites are gone it was tough to find much of anything.

I tried to browse Reddit, but even the nerds over there weren't nerding out over something this specific. As for other social media, Tumblr has way too many modern fic reclists to even try, and any other site was just a non-starter in my mind.

Probably my oddest method was using the Wayback Machine's API. I made a list of common fannish site domains and used regexes to find archived URLs at those sites that had "rec" anywhere in the URL. Many thanks to this Reddit post, which I kinda-sorta appropriated the API call from to get it to finally work. An example of one such call:

Beautiful, isn't it? (lol)

Once I realized I had over 100 fandoms I wanted to make individual pages for, I knew I couldn't do it manually. So I wrote a Java script to take in the contents of my massive site list and print out the html I needed based on the fandom I inputted.

Was this the fastest or best way? Almost certainly not, but it was the way that required the least Googling from me, and the compile speeds are just fine for my little project.

Probably the thing I spent the most time on was getting the filtering boxes also auto-populated by the results, since I didn't want filtering options to show up that weren't options for specific fandoms. I could've done this by hand, but well. I didn't want to, especially getting into fandoms with over 50 sites associated.

There are definitely some flaws to this system. I have to rerun all of them every time I make an html change to the navbar or something similar to get the changes to appear. That means some older pages will probably have broken links or inconsistent structure. I could probably (definitely, actually) make a script that auto-updates those files for me, but that's a project for another weekend. I also will have to rerun a page every time I add a new site to a fandom. I'll see how annoying this gets.

[Edit: 2/25] Well, it didn't take long to cave and make that script! It took a couple hours but will save me so much time in the future. It also reads the pre-existing html page and alerts me if any recs are successfully added to a page, and if so how many. Yay!

For the filtering setup, I decided to use something I was unfamiliar with and something I was moreso. With the amount of fandoms, I wanted a user-friendly selection dropdown, so I found Selectize. That's working mostly to my satisfaction!

To actually filter based on the Selectize, I used data categories in the HTML. Each Selectize dropdown option is linked to a specific tag/fandom/etc shorthand, which I then used to filter the results based on the HTML data categories. I also added a counter to the top for testing purposes (and funsies). This method (without Selectize) was one I used on a previous site, which was heavily adapted from this codepen.

This blog post won't be frozen in time; if I add any new features or figure out a new way of doing things, I'll make an update/addition!