. Spinning .

Yes, I’m STILL reading Confessions of Nat Turner and will post on it soon, but it’s obvious that I haven’t been the twice-a-day poster girl here for a while. Well, there are some good reasons for that. I’m writing. And, I’m getting quite a few stories published.

So in this age of me-me-me, I’m focusing on my own writing more than reading someone else’s–though I am reading about fifteen stories a day on the writers colony site fictionaut. There’s a sense of enthusiasm and support from the writers gathered here that I’ve not found elsewhere at this high a level of quality writing. These people aren’t wannabes, they’re for the most part, published authors and editors so they have that burning fire and unrelenting drive that makes writing a big part of their lives.

In the past few months, I’ve realized my own ambitions of being published or forthcoming in literary journals such as The Blue Print Review, elimae, Bewildering Stories, The New River Journal, fourpaperletters, metazen, Litsnack, Istanbul Literary Review, and others. A Valentine’s Day Challenge turned into a group of 25 stories and poems that will be published in chapbook form and I’m glad to say that my story is included. But it’s taken me a long time to get to this point and I can’t sit and rest on my laurels. What pleases me very much is that a couple of the stories were written in hypertext and that I’m finding publishers willing to work with me on this and include it in their journals.

So that’s where I’ve been and that’s where I’ll be for a while, particularly now with many of the submission deadlines closing before the summer. I’ve got a whole batch of new stories that need endings, and a long way to go before I can rest, but Spinning and its sister Hypercompendia are not dead, just holding their breath while I play on the railroad tracks.

Because Lunar has threatened to kick me off for over-utilizing resources I’m doing everything I can to adhere to their instructions, though I can’t understand how these two weblogs are hogging resources (I suspect rather that the server is under-resourced). Since the problem according to them seems to be in my main index.php script, all I can do is whatever they suggest which has been updating Wordpress, Askimet, knocking out plug-ins while adding two at their suggestion for cache and commenting captcha to keep out the bots. It’s this latest that I sincerely apologize for instituting but I’ve picked a 5-starred simple one.  You have to add two numbers together and type in the answer.  Sort of strange because even a 50 year-old adding machine can do this, but hey, hopefully, so can you.I just hate that it kills the spontaneity of commenting, and while I have only two dedicated commenters here that I appreciate tremendously, it will indeed discourage anyone else who thought they might one day give it a go. The only other thing I can do is eliminate the “click here to enlarge map” which is a great feature for this 100 Day Project (on Hypercompendia), but which may have to go as well. Again, I apologize and while I’ve just renewed with Lunar this month, I may be demanding my annual fee back and go shopping for a more qualified, heartier server.

Yeah, it’s been a while, but I’m again starting to ask myself “Why bother?”  prompted by lack of response (gotta find that Mark Bernstein post on why comments on blogs are not a great idea) but stirred to think more about it this morning by Carolyn’s tweet: “I STILL DON”T “GET” TWITTER…or blogging” and this, from Hugo Schwyzer’s weblog:

When W.H. Auden was asked by a Michigan graduate student “What can I do to become a better poet?”, he replied (this may be apocryphal) “Stop keeping a journal or writing long letters.” What Auden explained was that we do our best writing from pent-up thoughts and feelings; if we release that tension in diaries, for example, we might miss out on the chance to do some first-rate work. I am no Auden, and I am no poet. But if I want to write something that gets published somewhere other than on my blog, I need to be willing to give a bit more time to that project. This blog will continue, and fresh writing will appear here regularly — but it might just be once per week.

What struck me is Auden’s “we do our best writing from pent-up thoughts and feelings; if we release that tension in diaries, for example, we might miss out on the chance to do some first-rate work”  Well I’m certainly no Auden either, and no Faulkner or even a Steele, so I don’t have high hopes of publishing outside of my weblogs and so don’t mind sharing my thoughts and writings for free.

There’s an emptiness, however; an obvious emptiness when the work is out there and read–or not–and receives no reaction at all. Sort of like Friday night at the Improv, playing to an embarrassingly quiet full house. It’s likely less emotionally upsetting to keep things private–particularly when you feel like you’re hanging yourself out there and folks are just walkin’ on by. At least if kept to oneself, one can still feel that one’s words and thoughts have value since they’re not being judged if they’re not being offered. The creative mind imagines that one’s friends are either so bored that they don’t bother stopping by, or that your work is so bad that out of pity they avoid making a remark, tip-toeing silently away.

On the other hand, even as I write so much and so often here and in Hypercompendia that I must appear to have no live friends at all, I think that it has sharpened my writing skills rather than wasted them. And I do realize that blogging is more successful if it is focused topically, rather than shotgunned as I tend to do here. My Reality’s are boring or whiny to some; Literature discussions dreadfully tedious/interesting insight–but you can see that it limits the audience. And of course, political views on Current Affairs tend to always turn people off, regardless of the passion or writing put in. Something to think about.

Well that didn’t exactly work out as planned; even though I officially deleted the original Spinning, the files and permalinks remained because I had a new weblog named spinning, or maybe because the permalinks still linked to the spinning files and are being used by a protected backup.

At any rate, it’s not all bad; Google will bring a searcher to the right post (i.e., “The Road”) and that shows up on the ‘new’ Typepad Spinning, (rather than making it search deeper and find the new Wordpad Spinning post), but you can’t get any deeper than that, except to go to the ‘main’ archive from that page, and what you see there is the single post which notifies and redirects the move. If you attempt to go to either the post prior or after (they shouldn’t even be showing up there as options but they do), you get a ‘Password Protected’ notice.

It’s not the best link structure, but it’ll have to do for now.

Couldn’t redirect traffic from Typepad to Wordpress for the weblogs so while I deleted the old Hypercompendia blog, I’ve been reluctant to delete the old Spinning. Without an easy method (one I can do myself) of fiddling with the Typepad templates to somehow aid in redirecting, I came up with a workaround that will help with external links at least–although not with specific post or category linking. Nor will it redirect searches, but all that means is that I drop way down in ranking and that means nothing to me. Students may have one less place to look for literary paper ideas. Here’s what it looks like:

What I did was rename the old Spinning weblog, create a ‘new’ Spinning weblog, and place only a single entry that will act as a redirect page, though you have to click the link. It’s better than nothing, and all old external links will end up at this page so that helps a bit–at least until my Typepad account expires.

Learning a lot about the various methods of internet communication; learning a lot about the people who use them.

“Georgia” is a warmer, more welcoming font than “Lucida Grande” so I’ve made that change at both weblogs.

I find that the access to great circles of people without the intimacy or bonding appeals to a certain personality type. Political persuasion appears to be a psychological influence on communication style and choice. With the wide variety of services such as blogging, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Diigo, Netvibes, Yahoo, just to name a few, there’s something for everyone. There’s a phenomenon of befriending by quantity, rather than quality, but that’s a trait that’s always been around in man’s nature. It just seems odd to me that anyone would care about having 7,000 followers or making any kind of reasonable attempt at following them.

But the world is large, and there is room for all of us in it.

Was easily able to fix the missing logo (not visible in Windows) by sending the image to a PC and then uploading it into the header from there. Of course I rushed back to the Mac half-expecting to see it disappear but it was intact. Don’t know why it didn’t originally show up on a pc or more likely the case, in an IE browser, but the problem is solved regardless.

While I was in there I also changed the font size in the body, enlarging it from 62.5% to 75% 70% to make it more readable. I suppose I shouldn’t mess directly on the CSS of the theme but there’s likely an original in the K2 folder on the hard drive if I go too far wrong. Besides, it’s too late by this time to either make a duplicate file or even a copy.

Still working on the problem of redirecting external links and searches directly from Typepad to Wordpress blogs so that I can pull the plug on the old Spinning and Hypercompendia versions. Not really worried about Google, et al, but I’d like to graciously make it easy for those who so kindly linked to the weblogs or particular entries or categories so their links don’t end up at 401 pages.

Working on a logo for Hypercompendia. Also want to get those little ‘blog’ ‘about’ and ‘books’ links out of the logos here and there since they show up in the sidebar anyway–they’re really just another link to any pages created.

There are a few more things to upload here but I need to find the best way to enter them and where they should live.

Not totally happy with the typeface; still like Georgia and will likely fiddle with that at some point soon.

This has been a two-week effort and learning experience and I’m determined to be more creative and active with the inner workings of the sites so that I don’t so easily forget all the intricacies of stylesheets and codes. There’s so much I don’t know still but just feeling a bit more comfortable about playing with it is key to learning more.

I’ve pretty much been told to twut-up on twitter as I was loading someone’s twit-roll with my constant tweets.  I completely understand; the more folks you’re following the more likely it is that you won’t see all the latest from everyone without going back a-ways or you’re just ignoring them anyway. As must be the case with those who are listing hundreds or thousands of little friends and are interested in numbers–not people.

On the other hand, it was a method I used to keep track of the moves from Typepad to Wordpress, and those extras on top of my rants, one-liner poetry, and other just-gotta-tell-ya’s, I suppose I was cluttering up some folks’ pages. So it’s either back to the copybook method of noting changes–I have the first notes from ‘97 when I built a computer–or making note of some of the things done here at my own site where I am free to unravel. Meanwhile, my literature comrades are waiting for me to get over this and get back to lit postings.

What I might do, since twitter did serve me well in this function, is open another twitter account under an alias that no one else knows about. It might not be possible without making up another email address; I believe I ran into that problem before.

While pointing out my twitter-hogging has been a legitimate complaint in the pros and cons of social networking, it just seems that having to go back to the old ways is such a copout when so much internet communication is available and growing. The other possibility is to risk losing readers and that’s an option that’s out of my hands.

It appears that my nifty new logo disappears on the site if using IE as a browser. I wouldn’t have known except that I luckily have other pcs in the house and was using one of them.

I’ll try to fix this, but in the meantime, use your imagination.

While I like Wordpress, it seems a whole lot slower than Typepad to get to the posting page and even to load the sites. Maybe it’s just a temporary quirk.

One thing from the move that’s helped already is the downloading all the images from the old sites onto files in my hard drive, and the way I have the photos set up: filed my year folders in my “Spinning” file, then each image was renamed by date and category of the post in which it appeared. While some image names were much more valuable identifiers, many of them were screenshots and named that way. They show up now as images with the date below so a quick scan of the file can usually help in spotting the image I’m looking for, and the image name tells me where it is on the site. From there it’s easy to go to the archives and as I’ve done in the post this morning at Hypercompedia, find the permalink to add. Very often it’s the image that comes to mind rather than a time period or a title.

Or maybe I’m just reaching to make myself feel better about three or four days’ work in manually moving those images!

Typepad recently upgraded and changed their post entry form and between that, merging a writing class weblog into Spinning, and my own dopeyness, a few of the posts here are listed as uncategorized. Real easy to make the change with Wordpress. While in the Dashboard, pulling up the category file of “uncategorized” brings us to a listing on the actual site and it is relatively easy to make a change and repost. Though TP had features to do this, it seemed a bit more complicated and so I left things as they were.

Getting used to WP and basically I’m happy with the switch though there are still loads of tweaks and maneuverings to handle. It’s only been about ten days of intensive, dedicated involvement in the changeover but that was mainly because I had to figure out a lot of this stuff by myself or spend hours and days seeking answers. If you haven’t worked on the “inside” of a site for a while, and you don’t know more than what you’ve ever done, it all takes time. Hopefully I’ve learned a lot of new things along with relearning the old and will keep up the knowledge as I move along.

Finally forced a friend to read one of my latest stories and judging by the response, I think it can just go in the file.

Been scan-reading some of the 5000-plus posts as I’ve been putting in the images and making all the necessary tweaks required by the move from Typepad to Wordpress and it seems that in some ways I’ve lost a part of me in the voice. There is a freshness to the old posts, an honesty. Even as there is an improvement in the overall style and language, something is missing from my writing now.

What I’ve noticed is a lot of poetry–a lot of poetry–in the early postings. While I haven’t gotten a great response to my poems, though I’ve a couple published, I’m also taking into consideration that I don’t get a lot of response or encouragement to my writing from those who know me and have come to depend more upon new readers for a reaction. There is a distancing in online writing–weblogs, social services such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook–that build that fourth wall of artistic separation, turning readers into an audience. And when you’re sitting in a crowd, the actor doesn’t know you’re there and not applauding.

So on to reading literature that spurs my instincts rather than just reading for the sake of it. That, and drawing in the circle a bit tighter.

Well, there were quite a few ways to solve problem #2, that of moving the images from the Typepad blogs over to the Wordpress sites, none of which were easy.

Since Typepad makes it impossible to export just the image files, which I could then save, and import into similarly named files, I really have to pull them out one by one. The problem with my images were also that so many of them are named “screen-capture.jpg” that I don’t know what would end up where, even if I did manage to organize the file structure the same and then change the permalinks to them.

What I’ve found to be the easiest then is to go through the weblog online (not through the post list since that reverts back to the first page) or I could do it through the export.txt file created during the export. Then I click the image and save the image as a jpg on my hard drive in a folder by year under the appropriate weblog. I’ve also come up with a system of making sure they’re going into the right post by renaming the images with the date and category: 020208nm.jpg would be February 2, 2008, New Media.

It’s going to take quite a while, but I already have January 2009 files done for both, and 2008 for Hypercompendia which has more images than Spinning on an annual basis, though Spinning’s been alive three or four years longer.

Still, I won’t be blogging at the Typepad sites anymore, continuing on here and hoping that everyone is willing to change any links they have to my old sites and in particular, links to particular entries.

This has been taking up all my time, all my brainpower, all my reading since I bravely embarked on the great migration to Wordpress. I’ve upgraded the Wordpress platform to 2.7 with no problems, remembering to save the old wp-config.php file amd the themes. Fiddled around with some themes while I was setting up the sidebar and ended up back with K2 Beta, but then upgraded it to K2 RC7 and find it remarkably easy to work with–except for one quirk: I cannot find the color blue code on the links to change them after looking through the CSS over and over again and changing any numerical (usually 3-digit) or spelled out color anywhere on the sheets.The new K2 is widget-friendly which has made the sidebar setup amazingly easy.

Got around the Wordpress limit of importing no more than 2 megabytes of files (my files were 9 mb) by changing the php.ini file to reflect a larger limit of 15, and also by lying to the Wordpress menu and naming a .htm file a .txt file and using the mt-export.txt  method.

All this stuff was done with Hypercompendia as well, so the sites are all ready to go except for two problems. One is the transfer of all the images (possibly need to do them one by one) to wordpress because even though the images are there, they are being pulled from the Typepad sites.

The other major problem is the permalinks which don’t transfer. While I’ve managed to fix the permalinks internally, in other words, the permalinks on the Wordpress site do point directly to Wordpress, I cannot seem to find good directions that work in this particular instance with this set of circumstances. Some of the great ideas are too old, some of the directions don’t apply to my particular setup. I’ve tried three plugins so far that sounded promising except they redirect from within the weblog itself only, not covering external links to the old weblog. Yes, I can certainly tell everyone I care about to change the site addresses, and I certainly don’t care about my Google ranking, but there are a few sites like Wikipedia, a couple high school English classes, various sites that link to a particular series on a work of literature or a review of software, and somebody in Poland who has graciously posted a review and links to the downloads of my own hypertext work.

So that’s where I am right now with this project and I can’t really put it aside both because of Wordpress’ renewal date coming up and more, because I’m liable to forget all the mumbo-jumbo I’ve read in the past five days (believe me, you either get vague help or too much information but I’ve studied it all and tried most of it till my brain is fried). So it’s going to be either I figure this out and delete the Typepad weblogs, or I drop Wordpress if I can’t find my way around the problems or learn to suck it up and live without a blogging past.