I got a fifth or ninth or whatever spam comment on my Library site, so I finally remembered I had a WordPress.com account and thus an API key and set up Akismet. Die stupid spammers die.
The comment fun in my previous post makes me wish (sort of) that I had nested comments in this blog, so people could reply to comments and thus avoid confusion. WordPress has them, but I decided to run my blog under Expression Engine, which doesn’t. Maybe there is a plug-in, though I did sign up with Disqus which is a pretty neat commenting/forum service which includes a reply function and I could add that instead. Then again, I don’t get all that many comments, so would it be worth it? Or maybe I should just change the blogging software on this site to WordPress.
And in other, non-blogging areas, I’ve been thinking about ebooks and web-fiction lately, and I have to agree with this guy that as things stand now the way web-fiction is presented on the internet sucks. For one thing, a lot of writers don’t seem to have any idea about how to make their text actually readable—they just think “ooh, I can have pretty colors!” so you get their novel or story in red text on an orange background, or something. And then there are the extra flashy things everyone seems to have on websites these days—ads and flash things and Youtube embeds and so on. That’s okay, I guess, for blogs (she said through gritted teeth) but I’m not going to read a web-novel if each page takes ten thousand years to load. And then there is the issue of screen width—it’s wearying to read long text entries that go all the way across a screen. And I will leave unmentioned (because then I won’t stop) those websites with fixed widths that are wider than the average monitor so you have to scroll across—horizontal scrolling is a nononononono for text-heavy sites. (Graphical arty sites are another matter. I’m not talking about those.)
And then there is navigation: most text-inputting programs for the internet—where you have a site that presents a form that you add text into and click “submit” so it appears on a web page, instead of having to hard-code an HTML site yourself—are for forums or blogs or things of that nature, and this are not set up to have the latest entry put at the top of the page, instead of letting you have a first-to-last page setup like a book. Some blogging programs do let you reverse the order of how posts appear and also let you have a front “sticky” post so you could set up a web novel that way, but it feels kind of hacked-together doing it that way. Most blogging programs have “next/previous” linking ability already built in, so linking through your chapters themselves isn’t a problem. I’ve been playing a bit with Drupal, which does have a “book” module which will let you set up a book format and put the chapters in proper order as long as you remember some tricks (use numbered chapters but also the system of “weights” they have for entries because the system does not recognize the number sequence 10-19 as supposing to come after 1-9—a helpful entry is on this Drupal site for web novelists). But the themes that are made for Drupal are so far as I’ve seen—to me—lacking somewhat in my idea of perfect presentation, and they mostly seem geared to people who want to use Drupal for a blog/forum site.
So I’ve come to a tentative idea of what a web-based ebook site should look like:
- It should be plain and fast-loading—no fancy ads or heavy images.
- It should be in a pleasant, easy-to-read color scheme—say, black text on a white background. What a concept!
- The font should be large enough to read easily (and let it be resizable by the browser) and should be something common to all computers. However, Times New Roman, Arial, and Comic Sans should be avoided—the first two because they are overused and there are much prettier fonts around, and the last because it is a creation of Satan. (And also, sites in Comic Sans make you look like you’re thirteen and writing about your BF! who you totally like luvvv!)
- Kerning and line-spacing should be set in the style sheet—we will of course use css style to set the design of the site—to avoid that crammed-together type look. See my Library site, currently using the pretty (if not ideal for web novels) Erudite theme, for what I mean. (The only thing that I might dispense with is the justify-all setting; that doesn’t always work out.)
- The navigation links to the next and previous pages should not be at the bottom or top, but on the sides of the text. Some javascript or something could keep the links in one place instead of moving (unless this is too distracting).
- The text should not go all across the screen, but be in the middle, with white space on either sides. See my Tumblr site for an example. And this second one I set up is an even better example. (Tumblr has some nice style sheets that at least look like what I’m getting at—otherwise it’s not an ideal site for web-novels either. Individual stories maybe.)
- I’m thinking that there could be links along the top as well that would lead to outer web pages—such as a front page with a list of other novels, and a table of contents page.
- The front page of each novel should be a “sticky” page which would have the synopsis and table of contents, or the table of contents could be on a second page.
- There could be an overall front page with a simple list of every novel on the site.
- And something I thought of—one of my favorite novelists, Jack Vance, uses the mischievous technique of putting footnotes in his science fiction novels. You can do that with webpages by setting up target links, but it would be neat instead to have the link open up a small text box with the footnote in that. I’m sure that there are scripts around that do that. I would make it clickable instead of on mouseovers because I hate that thing where when you accidentally drag your mouse over a link a window with the web page opens up and hides what you are reading.
Anyway, that’s the stuff I’ve been thinking of. I have found also a Doctor Who fanfic site that uses something called eFiction, but if that site is any indication it creates rather clumsy websites. I can’t tell myself because I tried downloading and installing the program on my server and got nothing but errors. The person who maintains the software seems to have abandoned it a few months ago. So the heck with it.