When I first read Steve’s story on data backup, Norman Rockwell’s “The Gossips” came to mind and the old fashioned manner of maintaining history through verbal storytelling. And of course, the details that change with each telling.
So this became a study in family history that shows the paths that history takes when man and not machine are the recorders.
Well I’ve finally gotten the setting up of the stories in Tinderbox and their export here down to a science; the last story went through without a hitch. I even managed to put in the return link to the flash fiction page without having to do it on the server.
So the technical, the really technical portion of the project is somewhat under control. The story part is neat because I’m just letting stuff roll out of my mind. The problem I’m still having is the hypertext form itself. Even with as little as under ten lexias I’ve not gotten the knack of returns for emphasis, and maneuvering the reader through every lexia. I just reread the last story and got spit back at the home page without reading the majority of the work. This would be fine if the story was complete and satisfying with just those portions read, but it definitely indicates a lack of control as an author if it doesn’t.
Since I’m caught up, I might just spend some time tonight retesting and relinking.
Well, I know what I’ve been doing wrong with the story exports and it was the case of the duplication of the story file name, or else the lack of entering it into the Tinderbox html instructions for the URL.
So I’ve now gotten two stories into Tinderbox and out onto the Flash Fiction Page and am halfway through the third. Though I’m not participating in the 100 Stories Project, I’ve found that if I can follow along I can learn much, much more that I need to know about story written in hypertext and the thought process behind the linking, as well as the workings of the Tinderbox program that instead of being afraid, I can begin to settle into it.
Hey Mark–I did it!
I’m not sure what was causing the problem in exporting, but it was obviously something I was doing wrong in the html URL that I was putting in there. First I went back through all my files and deleted all the duplications and test files to keep one clean copy. Then I emptied out all the folders except the very basics: story title folder under the project folder, and put only the css sheet, the tinderbox hypertext, and the html. In Tinderbox, I took each story out of the Projects and working with one, gave it its own separate file. Then exporting the program to its own folder worked.
From there it was just a matter of keeping the URL correct for the export process, and I found a duplication of “backups” in the /uploads/100stories/backups/1backups/file.
Well, not versus really because it’s my own lack of experience that’s stymied me from figuring out the workaround of exporting html of separate Notes in Tinderbox as individual stories rather than keeping them within a larger shell. The same problem would occur in Storyspace, I’m sure, although I find myself running into its comfort as a known.
It seems that I’m constantly updating Tinderbox to the latest version and this time I noticed that-ohmygosh!–I only have a month remaining on my free upgrades.
It’s taken me a while to warm up to Tinderbox and yet I can see that it will serve as one of my most valuable programs over the long haul. Right now I’m creating some short-short hypertexts in it just to get used to the basics and to feel out some of the possibilities. The visual display of containers and colors, as I’ve mentioned before, will prove to be very handy in tying in a group such as a series of hypertext stories that are separate yet related in some way. This is what I’m experimenting with right now and I’ve already gone back and changed things around a bit as new situations develop. But Tinderbox is flexible that way, and no motions are wasted as the arrangements are changed to suit a different scenario.
In a few days, I hope to upload and link these examples.
Of possible interest, I’m passing on this information from SIGWEB:
New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 2009(3) / 2010 (1)
Deadline for paper submission 7th September 2009We invite papers for forthcoming issues of NRHM on the following topics and related issues:
– Conceptual basis of hypertext systems
cognitive aspects,
design strategies– Intelligent and adaptive hypermedia
personalisation, adaptation,
knowledge organisation systems / services, semantic web, Web 2.0– Multimedia issues
time and synchronisation,
link dynamics, link metrics,
multimedia authoring,
content-based retrieval– Interaction
navigation and browsing; search systems,
studies of information seeking and navigation behaviour, testing and evaluation
user interfaces, experience design, multi-modal interaction– Tools for hypermedia
(automatic) authoring systems– Applications
literary and creative hypermedia, social networking,
physical hypermedia, virtual environments,
applications in commerce, digital libraries, e-learning, e-Government, the professions, etc.The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia (NRHM) is published by Taylor & Francis and appears in both print and digital formats. For more details and indicative topics, see the journal website: <http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/nrhm>
Submissions may take the form of research papers or shorter technical notes and should be submitted electronically at the Journal’s Manuscript Central site <http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tham>
Informal enquiries may be sent to the Editors:
Editor: Doug Tudhope (<dstudhope@glam.ac.uk>)
Associate Editor: Daniel Cunliffe (<djcunlif@glam.ac.uk>)
Faculty of Advanced Technology, University of Glamorgan, UK
While focusing what brain power I had available in the last two weeks on linear story in another attempt to meet deadlines of lit journals, I’ve done little in the hypertext department except to put a story or two into the Tinderbox environment to compare it to the way I’ve done the same with Storyspace. I have found a funner way to work in Tinderbox, by using the colored box changes as a visual allure. Something I’ve always liked about Storyspace–particularly the Mac version–is the crisp graphics of the screens that you write into. It inspires by enhancing the tone. Tinderbox can work similarly, though I’ve not yet found the connection between Notes besides as they might contain a single story within and those Notes connected as lexias in typical hypertext narrative form. The individual stories themselves right now do not seem to have a connection but I can easily see how Tinderbox would be the more useful program in which to both make the connections, and yet provide the containers to separate them into their individual selves.
Twiddling a little with it then, but won’t be able to put more time into it until the lit journals have closed for the summer and I’ve no rational excuse to put it off.
Paths sort of stopped me cold from exporting it not only because of its unsophisticated structure but more because of its poor writing. But I do like the story concept a lot and so I’m going to spend some time on editing that and no doubt, will mess with the links and story hypertextwise as well. In other words, this is going to take some work before I present it properly.
Also looking into The Pigeon and The Shoe which I started last year, inspired by the Pittsburgh trip and Hypertext 2008. That’s got a nice idea behind it as well, all from an hour spent sitting in the park.
But there are other things that draw me too; short stories that may or may not be submitted before the lit mags close for the summer (shall I bother?); and for the first time in ten years, an idea for a novel that needs to be in that form. So there’s plenty to do, just have to get my enthusiasm for writing back into the driver’s seat.
After a quick look at the stylesheet for the basic golden grid, I think it would answer some of my questions about setting up a cleaner css for what I want. It may point out the obvious way to apply attributes and values such as border style, text color, etc. that are uniform to the wider designation of positions without each having this list of properties.
Even though I’m not currently thinking along the line of the visual reasoning of the golden grid, I’ve already got nine positions that I think are pretty basic: left, center, right, top and bottom for each–not allowing for three positions vertically since most screens are still pretty short and wide–and a wider (400 px) version of each of the three main positions which will obviously not be used at the same time unless I want overlap.
It’s nice to look through the stylesheet, even (and maybe especially) in its overwritten condition and understand what all that stuff means.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
