Hypercompendia

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.

Well I guess the answer to which medium of text is more enduring has been answered. Via J-Walk, this photo of a book is priceless. I’d love to see this done in animation too.

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.

One of the fun things about learning something new on a self-taught-but-an occasional-question-to-a-wiser-friend-basis is that you come up with some weird stuff:

What I’m trying to do is put some more information directly into the Storyspace template so that I needn’t go through all the files when the writing spaces have become .html files arranged in alphabetical order with no way (so far–I’m working on it) of knowing what links to what at a glance.

The image left has taught me that you shouldn’t use a 14 pt font unless you’ve already made arrangements in the css stylesheet for the headlines. For some reason, the export turned all the text into headline size. That’s okay, I’m working on a limited-lexia’ed piece as a test first.

This next little beauty is the result of trying to put the code into the writing space while in Storyspace to move a lexia’s eventual position on a web page. Evidently what I did didn’t work (okay, okay, so I’m working on this too) but it did make me laugh when thinking of the reason and possibility of hypertext and here I’ve got text escaping the boundaries of even that freeing element.

Well, a couple of quick emails with the President confirmed that despite the website information, the Tunxis Writers Festival on April 8th is indeed open to the public and I’ve posted the schedule of events here at Spinning.

Still no new media coverage included though so I won’t repeat the whole posting here.

I’ve decided to tackle Paths to enable it to be read online rather than offering it as a Storyspace download. This has been on my mind since last July when I first made it available and was concerned because while I improved and rewrote the Mac version, I never went back and made all the corresponding changes in the Win version and that’s what the majority of people have been downloading.

So, while I waffle on whether to fine tune the structure and create some more reading paths, I’ve been playing with form and color and have come up with this as a final:

Excited for Chris and the crew from Storytron on their official launch the other day of the Storytron World. (You find out the greatest news via twitter!).

I’m putting this one on the agenda to play with as soon as I can. I did some work in it a while ago but I wasn’t really quite new media savvy or geared to the style so I’m sure it’ll be a lot more interesting and fun next time around.

Congratulations folks on a dream turned reality!

It’s nice to see that since many literary journals have gone online they are now opening themselves up to the new media methods of telling story.

At Narratives, Eliza Frye’s Horse & Rider, Part One, is a winner in the story contest. Though the cover art looks rather kinky, it’s fairly straightforward in story. Frye also has more stories available for reading, and at the Narratives site,  the work of other artist/writers as well.

As the news media is learning too, when life hands you lemons you make lemonade. It’s just another turn of the wheel of civilization and we all either adjust, or walk.

Even as I claim that I’m learning the purpose and impact of patterns of linking, I find myself going back and fixing, changing, modifying links to offset a sometimes itchy feeling that a passage may be better off linked to an earlier segment of story, a different lexia that returns the reader to a point in the story where he must stop and reread the information to understand it from a different angle.

What I am finding also is that there is a certain importance to the color of text links. Two things have come up. One is that the initial links can be more emphatic in color, more in contrast to the inactive text. This relevance of color tells the reader that there are interesting things to be found, the brighter color a present of sorts as well as an assurance that he will not overlook them by reading the entire space of the lexia before wandering away. I find this point rather important; I don’t know how others read a hypertext story, but I’ve learned to squelch that impulse to click on the first link I come to and instead read the entire text of a space before moving on.

A more interesting element is the ‘visited’ link, and here I find that a still obvious but more subtle color is a soft reminder that the reader can go back to places he’s been, and yet there is a way of knowing that fact so that he may choose not to do so. There is the careful selection by the writer (my apologies to Barthes, but writer here refers to the originator of the text) of particular words that refer back (and forward) to a portion of narrative that may be either enhanced in meaning or be offering an alternate view.

My hope is that I can transfer this positive experience in practicing on short short stories to the longer stories I’ll be writing in hypertext.