Hi, all. I hope everyone else's work for this class and all the others is going well. I'm still struggling to figure out how to get my site live...I'm pretty sure I've entered all the FTP info correctly, and all my local files seems to have loaded to the "remote server" (or at least there was a little box that told me they were in the process of uploading that stayed open for an awfully long time for nothing to have happened), but when I enter the address it should be under, I get a "Page not found" message every time.

If any of you who have succeeded in making this work are going to be in ITS at any point tonight or tomorrow, I'd hugely appreciate a little technological help. Really. Anytime. I should be here.

More than anything else, my final project seems to want to look like an exercise in form and structure built on a solid theoretical foundation. I've mentioned before on this blog that the theoretical and historical component is about memory in general, and a mnemonic practice known as "memory palaces" in particular. Looking at the site I've built, and the method of navigation, it seems pretty essential that I provide (as succinctly as possible) some explanation of what an memory palace is and what it means to this project. Below I'm including the summary I wrote up, and any feedback (e.g., "no, I still have no idea what you're talking about," or, "okay, I think I have some idea of what this palace thing-y might look like and why it could work as a hypertext") would be greatly appreciated.

First of all, I really enjoyed seeing what people have been working on throughout the semester. I was really impressed by the form and the content. As someone who has not spent much time working with computer programs or even reading electronic literature, this has been an extremely interesting experience for me.

Today, I was particularly interested in the two presentations that were more along the lines of non-fiction. It seems that a lot of electronic literature that we have looked at is either scholarly or fictional. The closest to non-fiction are the blogs we looked at, but today I felt that the two presentations were more personal than any I have seen online. Perhaps this is due to the fact that they used real names, pictures, and discussed real places or perhaps the fact that I know these people offline. It may be that I am still unexperienced in the wide array of literature online but I am interested to see the possibilities of this sort of "non-fiction" in the future. More particularly, will this type of genre have a place online other than on personal sites that are locked, and open only to those with a username and password?

So, my final project depends entirely on a community that will participate in it. As a member of the Writing Machines community, I want to ask you to help me. Rather than telling you a lot about my concept, I'd prefer to let you try it for yourself and talk to me about it later. Seriously, it will take 10 minutes of your time, and it just might be fun. Check it out here. Many thanks!

I just read Frabby and Zoey's posts and their concerns remind me of my own. The whole final project process, for me, has been an expedition into the unknown. Certainly, Dreamweaver has presented a lovely set of concerns. For awhile, I really couldn't figure out how to double space my text. The frustrating part was that I knew I should be working on content, but I kept finding myself obsessing over the little formatting technicalities. For those of you who are working, or have worked, with Dreamweaver, you know that you can make a split screen where the top half shows the computer programming language and the bottom half is your actual workspace. I find it strange that, in the process of creating each page on Dreamweaver, you are generating a text that, a lot of the time, especially for amateurs, you don't understand.

With the final project deadline looming, I’m beginning to feel very nervous about my project being online. While I have the basic ideas of Dreamweaver down, I am far from proficient, and currently my project is just text, picture, and link. Not very exciting. I am feeling far more charitable to the other hypertext authors that I criticized for their boring/unprofessional looking websites.

But my worries go a bit deeper than that. Did anyone else pick a project that incorporates personal stuff? Like your family, your own creative writing? I did, and now I’m concerned that I made a mistake because I feel intense pressure to make it perfect (which just isn’t going to happen). And if it isn’t perfect, I will have been disrespectful. On the other hand, something we’ve noted about stuff on the Internet is that it doesn’t have to be static, and I can change it later.

Like probably most of us, I've been working on my project draft this weekend. And while I've run into a number of problems, I'd like to think they're at least somewhat interesting (that is, blogable) ones.

I decided to do a creative project for Writing Machines, and my goal has been to use photographs and text together -- one on top of the other -- to convey a story. And the photograph-plus-text part works fine. Early on I had wanted the two media to be incoherent if displayed separately, but I found that this was pushing my project in a gimmicky direction, and I relaxed my rules. Now I'm using photographs essentially as "pages" for my text, and it's pretty interesting to see how they lend atmosphere (and, literally, shape) to the writing.

Over the semester, we have discussed how writing differs according to the forum in which it is done. For example, recent posts have discussed how hypertexts offer disjointed, non-linear readings. Recently, I talked to a class member about the casual nature of blogs and the difficulty in making them conform to a structured, more formal style (for, say, the final critical project, if that's what you're doing).

I'm working on a critical project that is a hypertext and I'm definitely finding that the form is guiding the style and even content of my paper. I don't know how others are going about their final critical project (if they're doing one), but I started out thinking that I could pretty much write the 15-20 page paper and then worry about forcing it into an online structure that

So, I'm looking for some input here, so please post comments if you have ideas for me. I'm preparing to put my final project into motion, and I'm stressing a little about whether it is going to work or not.

Particularly after our exploration of blogs, I was really impressed at how much creativity this medium inspired in the "average person." It really is a big thing to publish, if only annonymously. My first reaction to blogs was very positive, mostly based on their function as a facilitator of creativity.

Of course, the second impression was not quite as positive. I began to be aware of the incestous nature of hyperlinking and commenting as the primary forms of "community." It is a good thing that conversation can exist in electronic media, but I would like to see it go beyond that world. There is great potential in the connections that online media can create, but I think that they miss a great opportunity in not reconnecting to the outside world that inspired their posts.

moleslog 04 10 2007, again.

Who is rolling over in Orwell's grave?