Deeker's Message of the Week
June 22, 2003
June 22, 2003
Because the search engine will only work on HTML files, it is necessary for me to convert the dozens of stories in plain text format to HTML files. While this may seem like a monumentally tedious job at the outset-- having to edit each .txt file one at a time and add HTML tags-- by using batch files I was able to make this task infinitely easier and less time-consuming.
The conversion was quite simple, merely enclosing the existing bodies of text within <PRE> tags.
For most, if not all browsers, this should not change the appearance of the
text; it will still look like a plain text file, using the Courier font
(looks like it came from a typewriter). Soon, for the larger, multi-file
stories, they will contain hyperlinks to preceding and following parts and will
be given HTML enhancements where appropriate. Email addresses and web site addresses
in formerly plain text files will be hyperlinked.
Discontinued stories in plain text will not be converted to HTML. If a Discontinued story receives an update, however, and is placed in the main listings, it will be converted to HTML.
In spite of this change it is not necessary to submit stories in
HTML, though doing so is certainly acceptable. As stated above, plain text
stories will be bounded in <PRE> tags when they are
edited and formatted for posting.
Because of the move to making all of the story files HTML, there will no
longer be separate files posted for story updates. Instead I will take
advantage of HTML's functionality by placing "#update" jumps in the files.
This will also produce a more accurate count on the number of hits the updated
stories received. The numbers reported for updated stories only include the
number of views received for the new parts, not the full story files. Since
the "_new" files will be done away with, the counts shown for updated stories
will reflect the total number of hits for that particular story.
If you want to update your collection of stories by having all the text files in their updated HTML formats just download the zip files for each story section. All of them now contain the new HTML files.
The Contributed Stories and the Deeker stories have all been converted. The Archive and the True Accounts sections still contain plain text files. These sections will also be converted to all HTML soon. I am hoping by next week I will have these done.
Because the scope of this conversion process is so large and that I'm a one-man band when it comes to running this entire website, errors are bound to occur and I am probably not going to catch all of them. Therefore, I would like to ask you to use the Error Report Form to inform me of any links which no longer work because they point to the old .txt files (which have been removed), or for any other links which do not work.
Changing all the .txt pointers in the story listings to .html was fairly easy, too, thanks to find-and-replace. Since I was in the process of making these significant changes anyway I decided to revamp the layout of the stories pages, namely make them appear less cluttered and easier to follow. Most notably, the longer stories with multiple files each now have a single line and are noted with a red asterisk * to indicate they are multi-file stories. Clicking on the links to these stories will bring up a list of the individual files for that particular story.
One other change you may notice is that the filenames which had been abbreviated were expanded to include the full name of the story. This is especially noted in the Deeker stories, which had previously been posted with abbreviated references to the stories (e.g. BDB for "Becoming a Diaper Boy"). Some of these files were vestiges of the pre-Windows 95 era when filenames for MS-DOS based machines could be no longer than eight characters. I had continued this practice long after most people had likely upgraded to current operating systems which recognize longer filenames just because it was more convenient for me while working on the stories. By now just about everyone should be using an operating system that doesn't limit its filenames to the old 8-dot-3 convention, so there's no need for me to accommodate such users anymore.
