Hypercompendia

Can’t seem to easily drag a Storyspace piece, A Bottle of Beer, into Tinderbox, so I’ve been moving it a couple boxes at a time then reconnecting them. I’ve always liked this story, originally written using Hypertextopia (I’ve since taken it off the site), then put it into Storyspace. I’m moving it into Tinderbox because I think it’s the perfect piece to use some jQuery tricks to present it in a much neater way. Since the story is pretty linear with some sidenotes, I’d like those sidenotes to be set apart rather than construed as a part of the linear narrative.

Getting into the jQuery learning to a point where I kind of get what it does, where it belongs in the html page, and how it works together with the html to fine tune or call out a particular action. I think I’m seeking what would be called an “event,” something that will result in a change in the page when an action is performed by the reader of the web page.

Haven’t gotten into the HTML5 or CSS3 yet; I think that just refamiliarizing myself with coding right now and practicing that will put me in better shape to move on into those areas and the changes that have made these what they’ve become.

I was very good about reading and following step by step directions all the way through Chapter 1 (jQuery for Dummies). As soon as I go that down pat, I flipped through the pages before going on to Chapter 2. Chapter 7 caught my eye: Slidng and adding Web Page Elements.

I made another new test.html and while I had a small bit of trouble making it work right away, got an image to fade in (well it sort of came on rather quickly) like I was supposed to. And, I still understand what I’m doing. I had missed a closing tag }); which I didn’t realize I’d be duplicating and was supposed to do so. The instructions went on to get the image to fade in more quickly by adding the attribute (‘fast’), but since I thought it went too fast already, I tried adding in (‘slow’). Well it either worked and I should’ve given it another five minutes, or (‘slow’) isn’t accepted jQuery-talk.

Now I need to go back through Chapters 2 through 5 to see what I missed. Oh, and I’ve learned to save all the separate html templates and am clever enough to name them after the effect produced.

Would that it could mean what it sounds like, but not so.

In my pile of “Learn How To Do” has been the element of using stretchtext in a piece, and while I’ve got several places to learn it from, my mind unfortunately hasn’t quite grasped the concept of how it is actually accomplished. It’s a string of code that goes…someplace. Surely in the CSS itself, but also with references within the templates themselves in the particular spot where it’s needed (or wanted; stretchtext is no more needed than much else in life besides food and water and sex).

What I’m going to do then, is quit fiddling around and draw it from the back of my head to the forefront, somewhere just behind my third eye (why–don’t you have one?) and set up the project today to start seriously working on it. Easier then, to start with a piece already written and the perfect one for this is A Bottle of Beer, one of my longtime favorites that I’d written a few years ago, first at Hypertextopia, then into Storyspace which I much prefer of course because of its potential. I don’t have it in Tinderbox, but that may be the first move I make just because I’m more familiar now with this incredible program.

Likely I should have left well enough alone, but decided to update a hypertext story that were two separate story files to ready the whole project for submission to some new literary venues. But oh, what a tangled web of lexias and links and re-coding.

I’d tweeted this:

Completely bogged down with bits of code that I’ve got to keep in my head to change in so many places. Intense. 37 minutes ago

And a surprise–an image in one of the notes in the #Tinderbox file–how’d I do that? 36 minutes ago

Weird stuff happening because I haven’t dealt with it in a while: #Tinderbox exported even the images to a file and the html pages are right less than a minute ago

…but it didn’t include the page link to the next lexia. Sorting it out like a detective. It’s fun! less than a minute ago

What I’d done was make a new copy of each of the two story files (complete, inc. the Tbox file, the images, the html pages and css and template) and rename them. Then I went into each Tinderbox file and noticed that in the textboxes where images were the only thing, the images showed up in the Tinderbox map. I imagine it’s because I’m using an older version of Tbox and could do that by dragging. I’d forgotten this; in the past year I believe I’ve only added the images later, to the html pages.

So in the Tbox file, I made whatever changes I wanted, also renaming this copy of the Tbox file and changing the export info to reflect that. Then I made up another new file folder with only the css and the html template in it, (working now with one of the story files only) and exported the new Tbox file to that folder. I did all this because there were changes made to the original html pages (such as the title page, the links back to the site, and, so I thought, the images) and was shocked to discover that the images were exported along with and included within the right pages. (Though size was off, but that’s not a problem.)

This is mostly for my own information, so that I can go back and find out what I did if I want to do something again. Like maybe that’s what I should do, go through my postings and see about those images…

Meanwhile, here’s a shot of each of the two files: