Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Story-to-Blog I

Posting an entire story on a weblog can be a problem, especially if the story is longer than a page or two. The narrow column format of most blogs doesn't suit stories, and visitors may find all that text off-putting.

One way to solve this problem is to upload your story to your personal FTP space and posting a link to the story URL on your blog. That gives your visitors the options to read or not to read.

Here's one of my stories, Roomies, which I uploaded from a file copy that I saved as a web page rather than a word document in Microsoft Word. I didn't fiddle with the formatting or coding; this is exactly how Word converted it. You can also convert a story into .pdf format and upload it that way -as I did with my story Red Branch here - just be sure to designate the link as a .pdf file so that your readers know what they're opening (some folks on dial-up have to download .pdf files versus opening them online.)

Once you have a story saved away from your blog, you can post a permanent link to it on your sidebar. A story posted as a blog entry will drop down as you post new entries and eventually disappears into your archives; a sidebar link stays visible for as long as you keep the link there.

8 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:07 AM

    Sheila, only one problem with the Word doc--it truncates on the right. Some of your story was missing when I clicked on the link. It may be a function of screen size--mine is a 15" flat screen.

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  2. okay, i love roomies !


    I've still got Illumination saved on my hard drive. That's one of my favorite stories.

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  3. sometimes, i go to lulu.com and post the whole story to the preview and then post the link of the preview in the blog. that makes it easy on me and i can't access an FTP. Or i just post the entire story to lulu and have people download it for free.

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  4. One of the many great things about Wordpress is that it allows you to create these things it calls 'pages', which are posts that sit outside the blog time hierarchy. They just sit there.

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  5. Anonymous10:36 AM

    Christmas arrived 6 months and a few days early. Two stories - oh happy day!!! Thanks! Marie

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  6. Just wanted to say I read Roomies and loved it!

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  7. Do you find that you get a lot of online readers? There seems to be some debate about whether it's worthwhile. I'm particularly interested in new models of publishing, and your feedback would be appreciated.

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