The story section

[electrodick]

Anna

You have a bad link on the stories page.

As Expected - The Project is the same URL as As Expected - The Exercise

Love the site... shame there isn't more change.

Steve

[lj]

both work ok for me

try reading the Forum, Steve, lots of changes there and a lot of material that never gets to the main site, for example my "as expected "stories were in individual posts on the Forum long before I grouped them into the three sections

[anna]

I renamed and moved this topic.

You are both right. An error was introduced to the stories section after the last update but it was corrected.

I will try to add more of the stories to the main site but I really need a new story organization system for it to work. I would also need the story codes for each story. (Please feel free to help me with this.) Also what story codes should be used and what does each code mean?

[lj]

Anna, I would suggest that other authors do what I did, and extract the individual posts and form them into complete stories or chapters, then submit them to you for approval and posting on the main site. When I wrote my "as expected" series, they were written more or less "on the fly" with almost no preparation, until the plot/characterisation started to get a bit more complicated. And to make things difficult, I had wrtten them on two separate computers, so I cut-and-pasted from the Forum threads, then did a bit of re-editing to make them into the three sections. I think it is down to individual authors to do this, you have enough to do keeping the site running

There are other story sites, you could "borrow" their classification method ?

[anna]

Yes, submitting the stories in complete and edited form is perfect.

I did have big problems adding your stories to the main page anyway because all the formating was lost when I pasted it into my HTML editor. So please forgive any formating errors in the stories and let me know if something needs to be fixed.

The story codes would probably look similar to the one used on other story sites. But the codes really needs to be chosen by the writer of the story or by someone who have a good eye for such things. It is easy to miscode stories, other peoples stories in particular.

[lj]

I did have big problems adding your stories to the main page anyway because all the formating was lost when I pasted it into my HTML editor. So please forgive any formating errors in the stories and let me know if something needs to be fixed.

Anna, I'll post here rather tham PM as trhe reply might be helpful to others.

I sent the stories in .rtf format as this seems to be openable by most programmes. Do you know what went wrong with the formatting ? Is there a better format that makes your life easier ?

[anna]

I do not know why it does not work but I do not think that it is caused by your documents. I have experienced the same problem with .doc documents. (I am using open office so .rtf is best.) The problem is probably in my stoneage HTML editor. Somehow it does not copy the formating, only the text so everything becomes one big lump of text.

This is no huge problem for me but it could cause the formating to be a bit different from the formating wanted by the submitter.

[thedude]

I do not know why it does not work but I do not think that it is caused by your documents. I have experienced the same problem with .doc documents. (I am using open office so .rtf is best.) The problem is probably in my stoneage HTML editor. Somehow it does not copy the formating, only the text so everything becomes one big lump of text.

This is no huge problem for me but it could cause the formating to be a bit different from the formating wanted by the submitter.

I've looked around online a bit, and the RTF format seems to be pretty simple (the guts of it, I mean). I have stumbled across an "UnRTF" script in C code that could handle the job, but it would require compiling to make it work, and I don't have a Windows machine at home just now. If you'd like, I could do the conversion for you while I try and bring the script over to something more portable, like Python? I could also try and remake something from the ground up (which would probably be simpler). The main styles you'd want to preserve would be bold, italic, and underline, right? And try and keep whitespace (tabs, new lines, etc) looking correct? I need to re-learn some Python anyways, so it'd make a good project for me.

[bound_jenny]

Here's a really off-the-wall, out-in-left-field suggestion:

Plain text. Yup, a TXT file.

It has never failed me. I never have to worry about versions. Everything can save this format, and everything reads it, from the lowliest PC XT under DOS to the fanciest doohickey at NASA. If you want formatting like bold, italic and underline, you can always embed the BBCode tags like

Code: Select all

[b][/b], [i][/i], and [u][/u]

Every time one adds complexity to a file format, one reduces the number of people who can read it.

Jenny.

[thedude]

Plain text. Yup, a TXT file.

You have a good point, but all the stories that are published on the main part of the site are in HTML. If BBCode is embedded into some plaintext, wouldn't it still need to be parsed and translated into HTML? Granted, it's a simpler job, but there are still going to be some submissions that come in as whatever the author composed it in (be it TXT, RTF, HTML, or DOC).

The main reason I think we should be ready to accept RTF and knock it over to the format we want with a minimum of fuss, is that OpenOffice can read a /lot/ of those other niche formats (like DOC) and save them directly over as RTF. So can MS Word.

[nitro]

I believe that most modern editors, including OpenOffice, can save as html. If the document is submitted in rtf and you load it in OO and save it as HTML your conversion might be almost automatic. I believe this would also minimize problems with malicious doc scripts and the like.

[thedude]

I believe that most modern editors, including OpenOffice, can save as html. If the document is submitted in rtf and you load it in OO and save it as HTML your conversion might be almost automatic. I believe this would also minimize problems with malicious doc scripts and the like.

True, but my concern there would be with Word and the amount of garbage it adds into HTML files. That, and it'd be likely to have other (possibly unwanted) tags carry over, such as fonts and sizes (which are good up to a certain point).

Yet another option would be to search around online for a WYSIWYG editor that can be embedded in a form. Protect it with a captcha and simple password (not for auto-posting or anything, just to prevent spam), and then let the author worry about how it's formatted. Many of those should are designed to strip out potentially malicious code, as well. Less overhead for the admins, more format control for the author, and decent security.

[anna]

Lets not make this more complicated than needed. The stories that are sent to me email ends up on the site one way or another. And I prefer .RTF format. I might make a mess of the formating sometime but the writer can just let me know whats wrong and I will fix it.

Saving it as .txt format is a great idea. I will try that next time.

[onestrangeguy]

I really don'tsee the big deal either. .TXT and .RTF formats are standards that almost any software can produce. I admit that sometimes it's nice to add a little special formating to your work, but that's really just window dressing. It would be nice to be able to imbed a picture or two sometimes, but I can settle for attaching them to the bottom if that's what's available to me.
It has got to me hard trying to please everybody. Like someone above pointed out earlier. The KISS principle works for the widest variety of users. I'm sure that even a Mac can handle .TXT files.

[thedude]

Sorry if I was misunderstood... as a software guy, I'm all about making things as uncomplicated as possible for as many people as I can. To me, that means the users (authors in this case) and the admin, since they're the people with their hands on the process. Complication from my perspective, as the programmer, means fairly little, because I'd only need to build something one time, and then be done with it.

It all may be a moot point though, as I might've missed something. Anna, does your HTML editor presently carry font styles (bold, italics, etc) from RTF? If so, then there's no need for anything I could do to help. The site could just 'prefer' RTF format for story submissions to save some admin workload, and that's that.

The only case I'm looking to help with is if the HTML editor 'loses' that formatting during the copy and paste. If that's the situation, then it's easier for me to write code to search for formats and replace them, like this:

Code: Select all

Replace this:
Part of this RTF text {\b is bold}.
With this:
Part of this HTML text <b>is bold</b>.

I guess on my first read-through, it seemed to me like what currently happens is that you have to go line-by-line through the story and re-apply all the bold, italics, etc, or just leave them all out, at the possibility of taking something away from the story. If that's something that's not too much of a burden, then it's fine... I'm just trying to help with the workload the best way that my areas of expertise will allow.