The 100 Days Project is a group effort of creativity that a series of artists have committed to in producing one work each day for 100 days of summer starting May 22nd, 2009 that builds upon story and explores all directions of creative force and output.
The main site is 100 Days: Summer 2009 where access is available to all individual participants’ work on their websites. I will be offering flash-fiction hypertext pieces to add to the collection.
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.
From Tale of Tales, another thoughtful view on games:
I’m considering to officially join the legions who are sick of the games-as-art debate. Because I am sick of it too. But not for the same reason. I’m sick of games. I’m sick of the endless debates on how we’re supposed to achieve something deeply meaningful by making people play with puzzles or achieving fake goals by adhering to arbitrary rules. Let games be games. Let them be fun. Let them be playful. Don’t weigh them down with all sorts of demands of meaning. Let them be frivolous, meaningless, brainless fun. Please.”
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
Alan Bigelow has a new addition to Webyarns, a piece called “Higher Math” that offers: “God created the integers, all else is the work of man.”
I particularly related to the Multiplication section; my roomate back in the early days was Carol Wojciechowski.
For some reason my MacBook doesn’t like the site and within seconds turns on the fan and protests loudly. I shoulda got the MacBook Pro I guess. But I can switch to the pc with all the hoity-toity memory and space easily enough.
Learning for me has always been easiest in the doing. Instructions are held aside and come into play when a need arises that can’t be figured out by clicking buttons, turning screws, guessing, or the real motive of comprehension as to how something would logically work. But I’m also hampered by a stubborn resistance to change.
That said, when I fell in love with Storyspace as a means to write hypertext story, it was a pita to relearn and rewrite into Tinderbox even though the two are very similar in many ways in the processing and theory of linking. Tinderbox offers a world more of capabilities and the visuals of mapping and layout are more open and yet precise in the graphics. I’ve been fiddling around with several projects in Tinderbox, starting from placing a few short hypertext stories into a project space and from there transferring a much larger Storyspace piece into the medium, and progressing to a new project for a longer novel to make use of the research and note-making spaces that would act as an outline or rough plotting structure for the narrative. Even though I don’t know if this is going to in fact be a hypertext work, the concept of having it take shape in a more cohesive manner than pages of scribbled notes (I’ve never been an outline person, except to make the required one for teachers’ purposes after a story or essay was finished) is something that at this stage of my life offers invaluable assistance in saving time alone.
What’s nice about technology and the tools that software offers is that even with manuals and thick text of instructions, a user can always maneuver within the simplest form that suits his own needs, knowing that should more arenas of possibility open up, the field is there.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology