Hypercompendia

With a few little glitches of memory and some software changes in Text Edit (Mac) that I wasn’t aware of, I still managed to complete a short little hypertext story and post it up on site here: Little Lives

The first four text boxes (pages) are directly taken from the Tunxis New Media class project called “Apartment 9”, run by Steve Ersinghaus and John Timmons. I believe this piece began in an earlier semester and when I visited a current class, the students were being asked to jump in at some point in the work and continue on with a separate trail from that point. I chose to start right from the beginning and focus on three characters already introduced (though I’ve assigned a name to one of the characters that was nameless and I’m not sure somewhere in the huge project she hasn’t been killed off).

Here’s the map, from the Tinderbox software which I use and which is being taught in the classroom.

It’s a really silly story that I’ve chosen to continue, but the important part was merely getting back into the style of writing a hypertext non-linear piece. It seemed natural to me to choose the two sisters and the husband of one as a good basis for story.

With the story unfolding, I knew that each sister served a purpose to the story and the husband of one was a necessary tie-in. Another was the theme of food and cooking. I had some fun with that. I threw in online gaming, and of course, a contest, and managed as well to come back to the concept of recipes which was also part of “Apartment 9.”

Then I ran into a problem with exporting from Tinderbox to html files for uploading to a website. What I found was that my simple little free text editor that comes with Mac suddenly didn’t look at all the same as I remembered it would and I needed to change colors and sizing and add some info to the text that wasn’t necessarily in the Tinderbox stage of the piece. It took a little bit of searching around and checking settings, until I found the “ignore rich text commands” on the text edit under “Preferences” and that got me back to the view I could work with, to change and add tags.

I didn’t do anything much new with this piece, instead followed the css and html I’d used on the 100 Days Projects, Blueberries, and a few other pieces. It was just that first step towards getting back into the game.