Hypercompendia

Here’s the latest version of Literary Endeavors, with the Poems set up and the Print Journals transferred from a Container to an Adornment. Couple things learned the hard way: If you overlap an Adornment onto another, you’ve got a holy mess on your hands because they become attached and move together, leaving the notes behind. Worked my way out of it, but not a happy sight as you move things around and the situation gets worse. But that’s what the “Save” feature is for.

Obviously, planning ahead for size when you want something that needs to all be displayed at once (another reason for keeping them out of Containers and using Adornments) is an important point. Particularly when you know you will be adding lots of notes on an adornment. I should have minimized the view right away and spread the Adornments to fit at that point, geared towards a horizontal screen.

As far as links, all I have so far is the (blush!) published ones in so far but I’m planning for the submitted and accepted/rejected return links as soon as I resize my layout.

That’s one of the problems with self-teaching: you learn something the wrong way and once you stumble across the right way, you have a lot of changes to make. On the other hand, a lesson learned from trial and error is one that sticks with you–especially if you have quite a bit of work done to date.

Once I realized that the thing I wanted was an Adornment and not another Container Note, I had to transfer a whole lot of notes into different areas. Thankfully, I didn’t have all the stories, hypertext or regular, and only two of the poems so far entered into the program. I do have about 80 of the print journal notes made, but few of the online journals and just a couple of the new media. It was a case of trying to fill in spaces from memory in some cases, just to have a few samples to work with.  At any rate, here’s the first step towards redesigning the Literary Endeavors Tinderbox file.

It was demoralizing. It was one of those questions that your knowledge and experience with the program should have taken you beyond. It was something I felt too embarrassed about not knowing to bring me to ask. Why was everybody else’s map so different from mine? Why wouldn’t my notes show up with titles? Why wouldn’t my links transcend their corrals?

The Answer: I was using Containers, while they were using Adornments. A tweet from Mark Bernstein along with the alert that though it was in German, it was a great visual, led me to this site by Felix Dencker, where I not only noticed that the Germans also knew something I didn’t, I picked up the word “Adornment,” within the article and voila’!

An image of the updated file “Literary Endeavors” (previous post image):

With the generous assistance of Steve Ersinghaus, I finally was able to figure out exactly how to make use of the Tinderbox features of using prototypes and particularly, the agents. This was vital to this project as the different types of works wanted to also be separated for easy identification of word count and eventually, published, in submission process, etc.

Once I learned what to put in the query strings and where to put them into the agent note, I can take it further on my own into the specific areas for whatever purpose I need. I also learned that the prototypes must be specific and no note can serve two masters/prototypes so that if I want a group to follow a chocolate/blue dress (example only) standard, I need to make that a single prototype rather than two; likewise, chocolate/pink dress would be a different prototype entirely.

I’ve made a lot of progress on this particular project, and also can apply that knowledge learned last night into the 100 Hypertext project that I’d started late last year.

Now, I’m having fun.

Finally got around to some attempt at organizing my literary endeavors into some semblance of order with Tinderbox.

What I’ve come up with so far is a file called “Literary Endeavors” with containers labeled “Print Journals”, “Online Journals”, “New Media Journals”, and three more labeled “Print Stories”, “Hypertext”, and “Poetry”.

In the “Print Stories” container I’ve got notes for each of the stories I’ve written and within each will be the word count, genre, and maybe a separate note within each for where they’ve been submitted. Maybe all will be separate, so that they can easily be brought up according to genre, or word count or whatever since that will align with many publishing restrictions. The same format will be done with Poetry and Hypertext.

In the three main categories of journals, I’ll likely put in a note for which stories have been submitted and the dates of acceptance (Yay!) or rejection (Boo.).

This looks like a fun project to do between writing bouts and will prove invaluable  now that I is a published writer.

Lord knows I push hypertext fiction to the point of being utterly obnoxious sometimes (Besides, I’m a Scorpio and I’m either flyin’ or dyin’ so deal with it.) but I really am still so high on the form and the possibilities that I can’t help but get excited when I’ve gotten someone intrigued enough to try it out for himself.

He bought himself an early Christmas present of Tinderbox and Finnegan Flawnt has been fiddling with it already so I’ve tried to help him learn the intricacies of the hypertext form by hypertextualizing one of his lovely short stories Listen.

Without adding to it (as I had done with a few of Steve Ersinghaus’ practice stories in prep for the 100 Days Project) I was still able to find several places where the story played right into the looping abilities of hypertext.

With his academic and web-based background, I can’t wait to see what Finnegan can do with his new toy.

Huh. Interesting export results in Tinderbox; not what I was looking for, but it may be workable.

Naming a container as a prototype, and making sure the story notes inside that container follow that prototype, I think I can export each story with its own elements since each story container came through as a file folder with its story spaces inside. No sweat to through in the css sheet to make special themes.

The only problem still would be sending the whole kit and kaboodle through the export process each time a new story container was made.

Hmmm. While I’m working on getting the 100 hypertext stories into a Tinderbox file, some little problems are cropping up–not unexpected.

Have slowly changed the individual Tinderbox story files to include a note box titled “title” (or “titlec” which indicates the column css for the last 75 stories, although I’ve since changed the css on the first, but wait–that’s another whole can of worms because I’d have to change an awful lot of links already online so while they’ve been changed online to the column100.css from the main100.css, the title boxes still say title as they did–and this has to be the longest rambling explanation I’ve ever posted).

While in doing this, I’m matching the hard drive Mac file to what’s online, once I put the individual Tinderbox files into another main Tinderbox file, it reminds me that there’s already a file called “title” or “titlec”. Well, yes. There are 25 files that contain “title” and 75 files that contain “titlec.” So?

So this: In the main Tinderbox file I’ve changed the title boxes to reflect their numbers, i.e., “title33″ etc.

But what about the notes that are titled “sex,” “love,” “end,” and all the rest? I’m sure that in 100 stories in 100 days I’ve duplicated many, many note titles. I can be only so creative.

I’m sure there’s an answer in agents or prototypes which ties back in with the original goal of being able to export only a single note container and it’s babies (children) to the new land of promise. This is all being done only because I wanna somehow use some of these stories to publish to a new hypertext story website by the end of the year.

Much to think about.

One of the projects I’m working on is getting the 100 Hypertexts Project into a Tinderbox File. Each individual story was created in an individual Tinderbox file, then sent out to a regular Document folder in a folder called Summer Project 09 on my Mac. Within each separate story folder was the Tbox file, the column100.html export template, the column100.css stylesheet with the color coding reflecting the particular story’s theme, an image of the Tbox map in .jpg, and the story page html files.

It worked well and I made it through without having time to learn how to properly use Tinderbox to create the entire project of 100 hypertext stories within a single file. Now I want to put them in there. With a bit of help, I’ve been able to drag the individual story Tbox files into containers in a new Tbox file.

I’ve just put in twenty of the stories so far, since this whole thing may not work in exporting yet as I would like it to. Meanwhile, there are some things that need to be cleaned up so that I’ve got all working in the same manner. Here’s the list of to do’s before I take it further:

1. Change hypertexts #1 through #25 from main100.html and main100.css to column100.html and column100.css. This involves changing the template choice in the Tinderbox program, changing the color codes into the new css, changing the individual pages to point to the new html and css. I could just let it go and play with it in the new Tbox file that I’m creating but I’m meticulous enough to want it right everywhere. (Though I’m not sure what I’ll do about the online versions which reflect the old styles!)

2. Add in the title writing space for all 100 hypertexts. I left the title separate in each folder just to play with colors and so it was never a part of the Tbox file. I am now putting in a title lexia and linking it in to each Tbox story file. Hopefully I won’t run into problems with a duplicate file on this later.

3. Find out whether the work I’m doing with the column100.css is the proper way of doing this; perhaps it will be better in a prototype to refer to the css and rename it to match the story, i.e., 1001.css or story1.css, story2.css, etc., so that Tbox doesn’t get confused with 100 really individual stylesheets all named the same. Come to think of it, the same problem may occur with the writing space called “title” or any other duplicated named spaces within the whole 100 stories. Something to think about.

4. Figure out or request a feature if necessary from Eastgate that would allow me to export just a story at a time, particularly if it’s all kept within a container. This is something that will need to be ironed out before I go and put the other eighty stories into this.

Now I don’t need to make this whole move, the project’s done and over with. And, I doubt I’d ever do it again next summer or whenever. But there are reasons to move forward on the concept. Personally, I may do something similar on a website where stories, poetry, and articles etc. on hypertext will be added on a weekly or monthly basis; an online hypertext literary journal so to speak. In that case, of course I’d like to use Tinderbox as the brain behind it all. I’m sure others do this with ease so there must be a way of exporting just portions of a file without exporting the whole thing.

This, I suppose, will be my autumnal project.

Jeepers, just an itty-bit of mangled code on an export template and you too can create this: