Hypercompendia

Since I was finally able to have a certain amount of success in making the internet play nice with Storyspace (it always did, it’s just that I stubbornly tried to make things work without coming right out and yelling for help, as is my way) and tweak things out a bit in simple things like color and font, I went ahead and modified A Bottle of Beer in the My Work Page. But there’s still much to do.

This piece is linear, with links to “asides” that come right back to the main path. This is because it was written in a particular form, that offered by the Hypertextopia online site. While the format appears simplistic, it does provide a certain service in that it fulfills a gap between the more complex structure of something like Storyspace or interactive Flash and the stricter confinements of straight text (though nothing’s stopping you for skipping around in the book). To be honest, the largest appeal of Hypertextopia to me was the flashy graphics.  So with my true whore’s heart of loyalty and love of dazzle, in transferring A Bottle of Beer into the Storyspace software and learning how to export it here at my website, the first thing I wanted to do was paint the hot colors of story against a black backdrop. This took me several days of creating new html templates and css sheets until I have it somewhat like what I want.

Next comes some fine tuning such as borders and frames and making each link take back on its original color that had formed a path of meaning of its own, and some fixing of glitches like the extra spaces between sentences that show up as E’s and the Spanish accented letters which html translated into some God-awful-scary voodo signs.

This morning I entered and resized an image in the html template, changed text into a headline, uploaded the new single page along with the image file, and voila!  What was that?

Many thanks to Steve Ersinghaus for the guidance and samples, Mark Bernstein and Eastgate for the original Storyspace templates, and Chris Klimas for suggestions. While I still don’t truly understand it all, it’s obvious that maybe I can handle it with a bit more experience.

Still getting a good book on html, css, and the like now that I’m excited about Storyspace and digital narrative again.

Who won the IF Archive CSS Competition with his design. Chris is also a talented storyteller at his site Gimcrack’d.

Somehow managed to get some minor changes–yet major steps for me–done on testing out a format for a hypertext piece. So after a couple of 18-hour days (oh, it’s been a week?) I took a break on the justification of needing to learn sticking in images.

More than anything, I love Photoshop.

I’ve always loved playing with faces.

It looks like I’ve finally figured out what I’ve been doing wrong for two days and as I guessed, it was right at the beginning of the process in TextEdit by not realizing the “Make Plain Text” in the Format menu, then still saving it with an .html extension.

I was then easily able to convert the two test pages I made so that they show properly, but have yet to merge the test Storyspace file with the changes I want to make.

It’s a huge relief though to get beyond that one stupid mistake to be able to tackle the next step.

I’m going to spend one more day on this before I break down and order more how-to’s from Amazon. I just can’t seem to get my templates working and I just know it’s some really dumb thing I’m doing at the beginning of the process because I don’t understand fully how everything works. Overdosed on lots of book-read instructions and online tutorials and yet it’s something very simple that I’m missing.

Can’t get a simple page online; meanwhile, hundreds of pages from the old sites, for which I’ve deleted all the files online, are still available for viewing. Ah, me.

Still looking for that perfect html template that will give me the ability to reproduce any Storyspace (or Tinderbox) work I do here at the ranch. I found the way to export it here easy enough, but of course want something more exciting than the white full page background with black verdana font and blue links. After checking out both Steve’s place and the Eastgate Reading Room I know the capability is there and that it is merely my own ability and skill that is lacking. I have copied at least twenty five different methods into the Storyspace html template to either easily change those two features (elements and attributes?) or drag in a css, but even though my template and stylesheet pass the test with this very valuable online tool call a validator, there’s something very simple (and stupid on my part) that I’m missing. It is fun to track down solutions to problems; it’s something my analytical mind was formed in convolutions to do. The only problem is that I forsake all else to stay on the trail. It would probably be a lot faster if I just took a class or read a book to understand the whole picture of hypertext rather than my own manner of plunging in and learning only by tracking down the problems. Not as much fun and frustration, perhaps; just faster.

One bad thing I’ve noticed about this move from Typepad to WordPress is the amount of spam that’s found both sites (even as regular readers and Googlers have not).

Going to have to check the Askimet widget or upgrade to a better filter methinks.

This is more for my own info: Without understanding the problem with the ‘next’ and ‘previous’ links not pointing anywhere near where they either should, or as I suspected, from the last reading I made prior to turning the thing over to the html templates, I eliminated the problem for now by switching to the basic instead of the basic-plus template. For this particular piece, because it’s basically linear, it solves the immediate problem of confusion. I’ll work it out after.

The other problem I had with two of the lexias returning in a 404 – not found page, I believe it was a case of one instance of two lexias named the same–regardless of the upper or lower case difference–and in the other, actually three named alike. I believe that when the piece was converted to html it disregarded the duplicates (since I didn’t find the html files in duplicates) and so in running through the piece, those lexias were indeed missing. Simple renaming solved that problem.

Now I’m on to presentation. Changing background color, font, size of page–or size of text space, font color, and the inclusion of images. Glad I have this short, simple Bottle of Beer piece to play with to learn the basics before transferring something as large as Paths which is also fairly a simple piece compared to most hypertext stories, but would be quite complicated to work with until I know my way around html and stylesheets a bit better.

Just so I have the info here for future information, one of the mistakes I made that caused trouble for me in putting a Storyspace project online was in the way I had filled out the url on the template. It was, believe it or not, a missing forward slash. What I did was create a file in my Lunar cPanel named ‘BoB’ in the uploads folder of wp-content and after creating an export file for the project in Storyspace, uploaded the individual files (I know, I could’ve ftp’ed the whole BoB folder instead) through the Lunar file manager upload. In Storyspace, I filled in the url as: https://susangibb.net/blog2/wp-content/uploads/BoB/  (That last slash was the one I’d missed originally).

Then, in Pages – My Work, I added a link to the first page of the project.

I used the very simple piece of “A Bottle of Beer” since there was little that could go wrong (forgetting about the Spanish letter accents!) and I’m glad I did so because the “next” and “previous” are still a mystery as to how they’re working a bit off. With a piece such as “Paths” with its more complicated link patterns I’ll have to figure out some of the quirks of the process before I attempt putting it online.  I’d also like to see if I can add the images in which I’ve sort of left out in this first attempt.