Your metaphor or your life

[rolanni]

As noted in passing, I’ve been mooching along with building a Sharon Lee homestead on the web, which meant learning WordPress.  It’s been going slow, not only because I’ve been having at it in-between other tasks, most of them with deadlines slightly more pressing than “whenever,” but because I missed the Whole Middle of the Evolution of the Web, so some matters which are perfectly coherent to those who have been paying attention all along, to me — aren’t.

It’s sorta like taking remedial algebra and calculus at the same time.

And the above? Is a metaphor.

I’m a writer; metaphors are part of my professional bag of tricks.

But I’m also a metaphorical thinker — new things are like other, older, familiar things, in my world; filed by similar behavior.

Thus, building a web page is like doing layout.

This, oh, my children, is how one does layout:

1.  Acquire content — either text or graphic — on a piece of paper

2.  Wax the paper bearing content

3.  Apply waxed content-bearing paper to blue-line paper, being sure it’s straight, according to the grid

4.  Trim as necessary

5.  Turn completed page over to pressman to be shot

Notice, in the above example, how the words are on the paper, and the paper is adhered to another paper.

When I first came to HTML (HyperText Markup Language, to continue the theme from the previous blog posting), I followed more-or-less the same steps.  I created a page, I placed content on the page, formatted and trimmed as necessary, then published to the web.

The process was close enough for rock ‘n roll, not to mention my metaphor-bound brain, and I continued to think of web design as a more streamlined layout process, encompassing the same basic steps, but without having to heat up the wax.

Comes WordPress.

What I wanted out of my new home on the web was a bunch of static pages, including a welcome front page for random visitors off the web, some pages listing publications and sample chapters, some pages, yet to come, about the cats, and some media stuff, for those who like to listen and/or watch.

I also, of course, wanted a blog.

The static pages went up fine, for values of “fine” that included a fairly steep learning curve — the math metaphor above still holds water — and then it came time to add in the blog — the dynamic page.

So, layout!  I made a page called Blog, and pasted content onto it.  I published it to the website.  All was well.

…until I tried to make another entry.

Hey, this thing isn’t acting like a blog at all!

I scrutinized my toolbar and found “Post” — that was what I wanted!

I made a post, published it — and couldn’t find it on the website.  Well, of course not, I thought, you haven’t associated it with a page; the poor content is just hanging out there in the ether, a ghost post.

Long story short — a lost afternoon as I ran around in circles, trying to make WordPress square with my metaphor.

Happily for me, someone who knows what she’s doing made a comment that provided an epiphany and wiped away the mists of metaphor, allowing me to (finally!) get the blog part of the site up and doing, more or less, as it ought.

I’m still trying to figure out a way to explain it to myself, though.

Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[wolflahti.livejournal.com]

Boy, can I identify with this!

I started making Web pages back in 1994, and I humbly say that I could do wizardly sorts of things with it, pushing it to the limits of its then-limited capabilities. HTML, CSS1 - I am your master!

But I haven't really touched Web design in ten years.

The capabilities have since expanded so far beyond what I then pushed them to that I might as well be leaping into the middle of a class on advanced particle physics taught in an obscure dialect of Urdu.

We all tend to work ourselves into a familiar routine while the world flashes by outside, because expanding out of of one's comfort zone is -well- uncomfortable. Gratz on taking the leap!

[drammar.livejournal.com]

As an old press shop and layout person, I appreciate your metaphor -- which strikes at the root of my current inability to create Web pages.

I congratulate you on learning new skills. 'tis not easy.

One alternative?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

I tend to think of the webpage (which may be made up of css, etc.) as a window or a frame? Which can actively select and arrange the data (content) which very well may be kept other places and arranged in strange and wonderful ways (aka databases :-) So I'm creating a template for displaying information, but I don't really know what the content looks like, and in many cases, it gets created after the window is set up. Thus blogs tend to start empty, and then as people push data into them (aka post), they make a scroll of the information, often in reverse chronological order so that the most recent is at the top. Windows, lenses, frames, templates versus contents and data?

Hum, I'm not sure that's any better. Maybe I'll get my X-acto knife out and trim the edges -- I remember my hot wax and light table and all that with great affection. I often got assigned to trim articles for our local newspaper because the editor said my hand was steadier than his...

Re: One alternative?

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I find it fascinating how many terms have carried over. "Cut and paste" -- I remember actually cutting out the text and using paste to reassemble it. "Leading" between lines (not allowed to use lead any more, it's poisonous!), 'kerning', 'points' -- even "CC" ("Carbon Copy", remember those?) in email programs. I suspect that most people these days don't think of the origins, even if they ever knew them (when was the last time you saw a teletype attached to a Linux machine (/dev/tty)? OK, I know the last time I saw one, the other day in my house[1], but then I'm a retro-geek *g*).

As far as web pages are concerned, I still have the old-fashioned attitude that the purpose of HTML is for communication, not to make things look pretty. I write in plain HTML, with possibly a little CSS for colour hints (which can be turned off), so that my pages can be read on anything. Unlike many these days where they only display properly if you have the same font sizes as the author, or need Javascript or even Flash to even display.

[1] Actually, mine wasn't produced by the Teletype Corporation, and is a more modern model operating at 300 baud. But generically it's a teletype...

[(Anonymous)]

Having recently converted Constellation Books' website to a new platform, I am sympathetic. I know what I want where and I know what I want it to look like ---- and having been a software test
engineer I know what the software is capable of if you threaten it
appropriately.

But there are times....frustrating times....when it won't QUITE do what I want it to. There are times when I, god forbid, hit View
Source and look under the hood to see what the stupid interface
thinks I want. So I can convince said stupid interface that Humans Really Do Know Best. (Sigh, I must have residual anger towards
this new website.)

The new stupid interface had the same issue your WordPress has -
ya gotta associate the text with a page. It took me several emails
and a short telecon with the ABA to figure that out. Grrrrr.
Which Usability Engineer thought this was a good idea? Hmn, maybe
it wasn't a UE...just a designer without the usability training/gene/experience.

The HTML is mightier than the WISIWIG.
Lauretta@Constellation Books