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.

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.

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.

One of the main reasons that I wanted to set up my own sites away from Typepad’s restrictions was to be able to offer some of my own work online, in particular, the hypertext work done in Storyspace so that it could be read.

Well, I finally was able to export one of my pieces, A Bottle of Beer, originally worked in Hypertextopia and transferred to the Storyspace format so that it was more available to my own whims. Though it’s basically a linear piece that was worked specifically for the Hypertextopia form of hypertext using ‘shards’ or what may be considered ‘asides,’ it was easily put into the Storyspace format. And today I was able to export the pieces into html format via the Storyspace templates, upload it here into the Pages-My Works part of this weblog.

There are some kinks to work out; some of the links point to a 404 page and I suspect it has to do with the titles of the nodes. Another problem seems to be the incorrectness of the links show as ‘next’ and ‘previous’ but I seem to recall Steve Ersinghaus having had that problem when he first exported a file and so I may find an easy answer to that if he recalls it. At any rate, despite the problems, it’s here.

Germinating: a hypertext novel based on political intrigue and lies. Depending upon from which character and at what point in the narrative that you read a scenario as to how it affects its believability and the ultimate possible outcomes. Perfect for hypertext; a mapping of events and recall and perspective.

Just too lazy to do it.

Getting antsy to get back into hypertext, or maybe IF as well, but the open season on reading straight stuff is nigh.

New ideas forming, perfect for Storyspace and loops and deadends: a dark political scenario; a trip beyond life and back; a little boy who never grows up; a train that makes unscheduled stops; an old man who dreams himself dead.  All dark, all intriguing, all calling to me at once.

Even though I’ve not worked on this hypertext short story a while, my mind is still on it and I realized that I had written a quickie poem about Pittsburgh that brought out another character that just might show up in this hypertext as a bit player:

Small Change

Oil the focus of a brief conversation
slips into a dream that night
of a one-legged black man in Pittsburgh
still swinging on crutches like a pendulum
through the slick surface of day

Why didn’t I dig deeper than a handful
of change, quarters and copper and dimes?
Even once, stop for a moment
and pull out wrinkled green paper or
simply ask him his name?

What makes memory fly like the swallow
and silverflash upstream with the salmon
what makes me want to return back
to Pittsburgh and talk to an old man
before the cold winter winds come home?

It’s likely just my own lack of inspiration lately but this hypertext is coming along at a snail’s pace. As you can see from this latest mapview, the writer’s and the old woman’s stories are developing a stronger line and I’ve found places where they tie in and possibly link.

I still don’t feel comfortable about how I’m doing the linking and am rereading Mark Bernstein’s Patterns to see if that may help me.  I’m beginning to think that while I totally enjoy writing into the form, I’m just not mentally geared to the process and perhaps linearity is more my speed.  But I like the concept of movement within a piece, and I love what hypertext does for backstory, setting, tense, and depth of character.  Only I just don’t have the mental alacrity to make use of the levels that hypertext is designed to perform.

A temporary character shows up:

…is getting a little weird: