Hypercompendia

It’s no good; I can’t just transfer the damn thing into html and make it any better with color and fancy design. It’d be like putting the cardboard back behind a work of art in a frame. Just don’t have it in me to cut the wrong corners when it counts.

So that’s what’s holding me up right now–as well as keeping me busy while I wait for more hypertext story–editing the somewhat sloppy language in Paths that I thought was so great at the time. That, and trying to figure out how to get the image of Jesus Christ from showing up as the representative frame of Recycling on You-Tube. No offense or sacrilegious intent meant, but He’s scaring readers away.

…the publication of Steve Ersinghaus‘ new hypertext Poem, That Night, in the 10th Anniversary issue of  Drunken Boat.

Congratulations to a fine poet and friend.

Just totally absorbed in this and must learn to solve issues more quickly as new stories are banging around in my brain. Focusing on fixing the little quirks such as individual space link color changes and other niggley bits even as I wonder if it’s better at this point to switch to Tinderbox from Storyspace or if that process will just take me too long to learn. Same thing with Paths versus a hot new idea on an apocalypse like none other, almost an anti-human nature movement and a new-thinking Big Brother-type regime. And a new website and stories and poems  all need their own space in time.

Quickly, quickly; I need to move on.

Course I couldn’t go to bed wondering if all my work in the last two days was wasted so I Filezilla’ed the test story over here and was happy to see that despite the lousy structuring and story, everything works properly. Even in Internet Explorer which I’m on now.

So I’m happy ’bout that and all…but…I’m not so sure I really like the boxes moving around so much. It’s sort of distracting. Of course I’m not reading them but just link-hopping and this is just a dozen or thirteen writing spaces, whatever I needed to try out all the different attributes, but still…

Well that was easy. Just added a middle position vertically for each of the three (left, center, right) horizontal positions by making a “leftm” etc. though I’m sure it would be better to make it obvious with a “leftmiddle” designation. And of course, new questions come from this move.

First, with a Mac Book I’m not sure I want a lower or third level position. Now with my husband’s monitor which is 19 x 19 approximately, it’d be fine. So that’s a stop and thinker.

The other thing of course is that while it’s easy enough to copy and paste the whole rigamorole including borders and widths and paddings and just change the position throughout the stylesheet, I’m sure I missed an easier way–or rather simply a cleaner way of coding it. Probably under an umbrella of some sort. That’s what you get for skimming the textbooks or not listening. Then again, I am learning more about how things act and it’s not like I’m expecting to get a job out of this.

Then it happens; I remember that I should be testing all this in IE or other browsers as well.

Who’da thunk that I’d ever have gotten into the underlying structure of composing and presenting hypertext narrative? I loved Storyspace because it didn’t require much of me aside from twiddling a few dials to set up a very elegant looking hypertext so that I could concentrate on writing story. The drive to present that story online, however, led me into the whole code thing. It meant setting up a weblog that could allow for offering the pieces online, and that meant moving from Typepad to WordPress and setting up two new homes. Then learning css and html to export from Storyspace into the sites. From there, the imagination goes wild but it’s a fun learning process and each baby step I make (or elderly shuffle) is both an accomplishment as well as a treat.

Obviously, when one adds another element into the equation there naturally comes a need for variables.  With the major step of background image comes consideration of text color. On the last image, while I Photoshopped to make a dark text readable, there are other things to consider such as the links.

So I grabbed another image out of my garden files, one that in reality was hot coral California poppies and sun-drenched green leaves. I was going for composition knowing that the color was a big no-no. Ended up with this (below) and still, the original link color of cream is not going to work. But that’s fine. All I have to do is work out how to change that in a working narrative for the future.

In most projects you come to a point where the trail of thought diverges and there are several ways of doing the same thing as well as several directions in which to branch out. This is truly a hypertext moment.

With some ideas in mind of what I’d like to be able to do (positioning of lexias), even without getting into the golden grid method yet I may have other options of accomplishing what I want to do. This is when the old “a little knowledge is dangerous” becomes a possibility.

I’ve already likely gone the long way around to manage the postions already: left, leftlarge, leftlargea, center, centerlarge, centerlargea, right, rightlarge (no rightlargea). The left and leftlarge are 285 and 400 px wide, or roughly allowing for a 3 column position versus a single fixed. The addition of “a” on the leftlargea is the designation for the image background rather than the designated color. All work; all are, I’m sure, more elaborated and sloppy css than necessary but remember, I’m not classroom-taught here and my own mind works in “next step” and “try it and see” ways. All time-consuming, yet more fully understood because they come from logic rather than instruction or rote.

Now as I ponder my next move, I’m guessing that a placement of “top: 150 px;” code would likely give me the vertical positioning. But then, I’m going to have a css that’s going to cover every possibile combination of positions and colors and text and sizes and then, only then, will I be smart enough to go back to the books and find out a shorthand method of coding it all in.

This may not mean much to anyone but me, but I’ve just learned a lot:

No sooner are the words out of my mouth than I go back to the problem that’s had me stymied and find out that overnight something made it work:

Now it’s not working exactly the way I want it to since it looks like the image as background code may have applied to all the templates, overwhelming the solid color background, but at least I know that finally the simple direction is working–I had no idea why it hasn’t (for the last week and a half).

The problem of applying it to only certain template pages won’t be all that difficult to do.

Once I was placed on the right trail by a friend, I’ve been able to work some of my wants and needs into the process of exporting a hypertext written in Storyspace into html with css that for the most part covers all bases–at least of the necessity element. Wouldn’t have thought that html could be entered right into the SSP writing spaces to cover attributes of those particular spaces, i.e., #left, #center, #right, etc. and while each has to be individually put in, it’s better to do it in SSP when the links and relationships are easy to see via the map view.

Couple of things that I haven’t done yet that I think would be interesting is to integrate stretchtext into Paths. Because of its nature of appearing dreamlike and fading, stretchtext mimics the nature of this particular narrative because it is basically reflections on ‘what if’s?’ by the characters, and the possibility of different futures based on the choices. I like the idea of the text appearing on a different portion of the same page, and that might be one way to go.

Another effect I need to work on is bringing in images and maybe film clips as well as audio. I’m guessing however that my skill and knowledge is still a long way off for this kind of stuff (since I still haven’t discovered the trick to the background image) and there is a need to accomplish something before moving on to the more elaborate manipulations.

So maybe Paths is on the front burner for this week, with a good look at improving link relationships, discovering what impact if any that the different positions will have on the work, and of course, editing the text itself since I just can’t help myself.