Hypercompendia

Since I was finally able to have a certain amount of success in making the internet play nice with Storyspace (it always did, it’s just that I stubbornly tried to make things work without coming right out and yelling for help, as is my way) and tweak things out a bit in simple things like color and font, I went ahead and modified A Bottle of Beer in the My Work Page. But there’s still much to do.

This piece is linear, with links to “asides” that come right back to the main path. This is because it was written in a particular form, that offered by the Hypertextopia online site. While the format appears simplistic, it does provide a certain service in that it fulfills a gap between the more complex structure of something like Storyspace or interactive Flash and the stricter confinements of straight text (though nothing’s stopping you for skipping around in the book). To be honest, the largest appeal of Hypertextopia to me was the flashy graphics.  So with my true whore’s heart of loyalty and love of dazzle, in transferring A Bottle of Beer into the Storyspace software and learning how to export it here at my website, the first thing I wanted to do was paint the hot colors of story against a black backdrop. This took me several days of creating new html templates and css sheets until I have it somewhat like what I want.

Next comes some fine tuning such as borders and frames and making each link take back on its original color that had formed a path of meaning of its own, and some fixing of glitches like the extra spaces between sentences that show up as E’s and the Spanish accented letters which html translated into some God-awful-scary voodo signs.