HOW TO DO A STORY FILE

 

 

I'm sure a lot of people are wondering how to put their stories online the easy way.

 

The short answer is that there is no easy way, but here's a start:

 

First of all, make sure that your MS word document looks basically the way you want it; that is, if you want web-style breaks like the ones I'm using here, make sure that's what your document looks like on MS Word.

 

If you're addicted to using paragraphs, but want your document to have web-style breaks online, go to ‘Edit’, hit the ‘find/replace’ button, and replace <p> with <l>.  Then replace <t> with <l> as well.  For some reason, there are always some paragraphs where this doesn’t work.[1]  Go through and fix them.

 

It takes up more space but is a lot easier to simply upload the entire file rather than using cut and paste.  So…

 

0)      Change paragraph breaks by replacing both <p> and <t> with <l>.  Make sure that you’ve gotten them all.

1)      Save file as something-dot-html after changing the paragraph breaks.

2)      Upload the file.

3)      Edit the file.

4)      Insert

 

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtmlhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

 

<head>

<title> Title of Your Story </title>

<link rel="stylesheet" href=" url of your main web page xprose.css

" type="text/css" />

<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE" />

</head>

 

<div>

<h1>Title of Your Story </h1>

<h3>Title of Your Chapter </h3></p>

 

before the story.

 

5)      Insert

 

</div>

 

</div>

<p>

<p>

<align="center"><a href=url of Your Next Chapter >Continue</a><br>

<p>

Back to <a href=Homepage url >Title of Your Website </a><br>

<p>

 

<hr />

<a href=http://validator.w3.org/check?url= url of this webpage"><img border="0" src="vxhtml110.gif" alt="Valid XHTML 1.0!" height="31" width="88" /></a>

</div>

</body>

</html>

 

after the story.

 

6)      Save.

 

 

In order for this to work, you have to have uploaded x.html, which is pretty incredible.  Try going to the website for Genma’s Daughter, on my ‘other Ranma websites’ page.  She has a link to it there, because she uses the same system.

 

If you don’t want to bother, or you don’t really like book-size indents or blue background, you don’t have to use x-html.  Instead, insert

 

<html>

<head>

<title> Title of Your Story </title>

<body>

<div>

<h1>Title of Your Story </h1>

<h3>Title of Your Chapter </h3></p>

 

before the story,

 

and

 

</div>

 

</div>

<p>

<p>

<align="center"><a href=url of Your Next Chapter >Continue</a><br>

<p>

Back to <a href=Homepage url >Title of Your Website </a><br>

<p>

</div>

</body>

</html>

 

after the story.

 



[1] This is because sometimes, the computer will make a new paragraph for you automatically, especially if you’re doing lots of dialogue.  <p> and <t> refer, I believe, to formatting you do yourself.  Could be wrong, though.