Hypercompendia

One of the main reasons that I wanted to set up my own sites away from Typepad’s restrictions was to be able to offer some of my own work online, in particular, the hypertext work done in Storyspace so that it could be read.

Well, I finally was able to export one of my pieces, A Bottle of Beer, originally worked in Hypertextopia and transferred to the Storyspace format so that it was more available to my own whims. Though it’s basically a linear piece that was worked specifically for the Hypertextopia form of hypertext using ‘shards’ or what may be considered ‘asides,’ it was easily put into the Storyspace format. And today I was able to export the pieces into html format via the Storyspace templates, upload it here into the Pages-My Works part of this weblog.

There are some kinks to work out; some of the links point to a 404 page and I suspect it has to do with the titles of the nodes. Another problem seems to be the incorrectness of the links show as ‘next’ and ‘previous’ but I seem to recall Steve Ersinghaus having had that problem when he first exported a file and so I may find an easy answer to that if he recalls it. At any rate, despite the problems, it’s here.

Since my text widgets don’t serve as links (gotta figure that one out) I’ve changed the banner to upload just background without text and am using the “show text” feature of the Dashboard’s easy-do upload of custom banner. Also had to take out any “description” on the Settings page so that that didn’t come through. You have to actually click on the name to use the link, but it’s better than nothing for now.

Now, on to do the same with Spinning.

Didn’t realize that while I neatly took the distracting tabs out of the banner, I also cut off all ways of getting back to the main page, or home (and the rolling archive menu doesn’t give us that either).

Steve pointed this out to me and helped locate the problem; that of the easy Dashboard method of installing a custom banner. With that, you need to “hide text” or the silly thing shows through. By hiding the text, the banner is no longer a link to the main page. For now I’ve added a “HOME” widget (not working right at this point) to the sidebar as he also suggested until I can find the proper way of making the banner work as it should. This didn’t happen in Typepad, so I didn’t even think of checking and am thankful that Steve pointed it out.

Three weeks spent on this move, upgrading, exporting, tweaking, and all I did was upgrade WordPress 2.7 again to 2.7.1 and all my efforts just went to hell.

It’s just not worth it.

UPDATE: Some of the problems I encountered are in this Spinning post so I won’t duplicate them here, but with about an hour’s worth of additional work, I got things back to normal.

Since Typepad doesn’t allow a 404 or 301 redirect page, and since I can’t understand how to play with the templates to get something in there, I’ve come up with a semi-workable solution that will at least help the external links to the weblogs if not to the direct postings (for particular projects like Storyspace or Facade or in Spinning, literature reviews). After deleting the old Hypercompendia weblog (Spinning’s just password-protected for now–it’s tough to pull the plug on 5 years of my life), I’ve created a new weblog in Typepad with the same Hypercompendia name and posted the link to the new WordPress weblog to serve as a redirect. It looks like this:

This will work only because my Typepad account is paid up in advance for quite a few months so I believe it’s well-worth the money to redirect to the new weblog, even if only taking care of a portion of the searches and links. Now to do something like this with Spinning.

…and they’d better, since I destroyed the old Typepad Hypercompendia this morning and put up a temporary lock on Spinning.

Couldn’t find a way to redirect a Typepad hosted weblog anywhere else, although internally, the permalinks here and at Spinning are correct (except within posts). I tried a bunch of ways and can’t even come up with a 401 page much less a 301 unless I am willing to pay to have someone handle it for me. It’s just not worth it and I’m overdosed on this move and want to get back to reading and writing and playing with new narrative forms. There’s only one more possibility and that’s through Google but I’d still have to find some way of putting up a redirect template on the Typepad weblog and it’s more trouble than it’s worth, I think.

Been playing with logos here, and I’ve just slapped the old one up with new text for now until I come up with something exquisite.

In the meantime, I apologize if anyone has a hard time finding me; I did give my two-week notice.

The bad part about designing a logo is that it doesn’t take long to come up with something you think is cool. The next bad thing is giving up the old one that you thought was so cool.

This one’s sort of glitzy and bold, but I like it. The good thing is that I am not so crazy about it that I’ll let it sit for a year, afraid that I won’t come up with something better. Now I have to adjust the font colors a bit, maybe make the links really red. The background will likely remain white though I might fiddle a bit with a super light gray.