“All’s Fair in Love & War, Texas” is live

In Fiction, Narrative, Web Development, Writing on 20 October 2009 with 1 comment

After months of prepa­ra­tion, All’s Fair in Love and War, Texas is finally live.

I real­ize it might not look like it to the untrained eye, but this web­site was a lot of work. (Work which, I have to admit, I mostly enjoyed.) It’s built on Wordpress, but it was my first attempt at build­ing a WP theme from scratch. So I had that learn­ing curve to tackle, which was respectable. (If I had it all to do over again, I would prob­a­bly start out with the Thematic theme and build a child theme from there. I dis­cov­ered Thematic when build­ing a web­site for my husband’s job, and it’s wonderful.)

So I built the theme myself. And then I ran into some cod­ing prob­lems. See, from the begin­ning I knew I did not want to cre­ate just anther blog-based seri­al­ized novel. There are TONS of those on the net. Given my pen­chant for the web and “new media” in gen­eral, I wanted to cre­ate some­thing that, as far as I was aware, hadn’t really been done else­where. Building upon some basic beliefs I have about how web users assim­i­late infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge (about which I have an arti­cle com­ing out on A List Apart some time this fall) I knew I wanted to cre­ate a nar­ra­tive that had many points of entry and exit. I wanted my read­ers to choose for them­selves which nar­ra­tives to fol­low. And more­over, I wanted to take all the work out of it. I wanted choos­ing a nar­ra­tive to be intu­itive and easy.

So the first thing I needed to do was cre­ate meta­data for each story. Which char­ac­ters are involved? Where does this story take place? Which story line does it fall into? And I needed to dis­play this meta­data in a way that would make sense to the reader, yet wouldn’t be overwhelming.

Turns out, there’s not a way built into Wordpress to do this. You can tell Wordpress to show you the chil­dren of cer­tain cat­e­gories, but you can’t ask Wordpress to show you the chil­dren of X cat­e­gory ONLY if this post belongs to the par­ent cat­e­gory (an sub­se­quently, only if it belongs to the chil­dren cat­e­gories!) This was a fun­da­men­tal nav­i­ga­tional aspect I needed for this site. I needed to say, “Okay, Wordpress, show me the chil­dren of the Characters cat­e­gory that this post belongs to, and then show me the chil­dren of the Places cat­e­gory this belongs to, and then show me the chil­dren of the Events cat­e­gory this post belongs to.”

I tried to make Wordpress do this. I really did. But Wordpress just stuck its tongue out at me. Real mature.

So I cried. (Yeah, nei­ther mature nor pro­duc­tive, I know, but I’m prone to break­downs when code fails. This is after the curs­ing has ended.) I cried because I couldn’t get it to work, and because if I couldn’t get it to work, the entire project was going to fail. Without this aspect, the web­site would be just like tons of other web nov­els out there.

Then I posted about my trou­bles on Twitter where a very kind English bloke offered to help me. And to make a long story short, he fixed my prob­lem. And he’s awesome.

Then I ran into another prob­lem. Each story poten­tially belongs to sev­eral dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tives – cer­tain char­ac­ters, cer­tain places, cer­tain sto­ry­lines. I wanted my read­ers to choose how they read the story, but how was I going to make it pos­si­ble for them to con­tinue in their nar­ra­tive seam­lessly? I mean, when they got to the end of the story, the “next” but­ton would always point to the next chrono­log­i­cal post, but not nec­es­sar­ily the next post in the nar­ra­tive my reader had cho­sen. So if they only wanted to read posts fea­tur­ing the Prime of Darkness, they’d have to locate the POD archive, select a post, read, then go back to the archive, find the next post, read it, and so on.

Unacceptable.

I needed to pro­vide nav­i­ga­tion that suited the nar­ra­tive. But how could I know which nar­ra­tive they were on? How could I know how to help them get to the next post in their cho­sen narrative?

I con­sid­ered a lot of options. I thought about adding nav­i­ga­tion for every pos­si­ble exit point. But even with a healthy dose of Ajax, that seemed clunky (and it wasn’t easy to code, as it turned out.)

Then I stum­bled upon a plu­gin that allowed me to do exactly what I wanted. When you choose a link from an archive, the next/previous nav­i­ga­tion remem­bers what archive you came from, and lets you nav­i­gate only that archive. So if you’re look­ing at the Prime of Darkness archive and you click a post, you will nav­i­gate only that story line.

Not only accept­able, but awe­some.

And after that, the site took off running.

I ran into other, less tech­ni­cal, prob­lems, too. The fact that I can’t draw was a huge obsta­cle, so I decided to just include illus­tra­tions where I could cre­ate some­thing that looked halfway decent. I worked hard on the char­ac­ter avatars, and while cer­tain avatars that I made early on could stand to be redrawn, I am mostly very happy with them.

All in all, I count this project a huge suc­cess. It works as intended. (There is one small bug that I still don’t know how to fix, but it’s a bug I can live with for now.) It’s dif­fer­ent from the other hun­dreds of dig­i­tal nar­ra­tives out there. I’m proud of the voice, and the char­ac­ter, and what I’ve man­aged to accom­plish, more or less by myself.

It’s a happy day :)

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