Adventures in Dynamic Views: A Blogger Adventure (AKA, Please Drop By and Let Me Know if You Can Comment Now)

Yo! So, I signed on to do Camp NaNoWriMo at the beginning of the month, a goal I set alongside sundry other goals to get my writing house in order. With a two-thirds finished manuscript and a handful of short stories I wanted to write - not to mention a plan to get back on the submission horse and possibly start editing a collection of short stories - why not completely change my blog?

I admit this was a spontaneous change brought on by the envy I felt looking at Deborah Walker's shiny new template. When she claimed in a post's comments that she was getting way more page views with the new format, I was sold.

I admit, I like a lot about Dynamic Views. To me, part of the purpose of having a blog is having a whole lot of stuff you've written available to people online. One of the things I've found pesky about a traditional blog format is that it is fairly challenging to a reader who might want to poke around in the archive to access that archive. Blogger's "archive" widget is pretty crappy in terms of navigation. With Dynamic Views, the reader has access to the entire blog via a simple scroll down. Dynamic Views actively encourages people to wander around and take a look at the place. Yay!

Once I had it installed, I realized there were some big problems with Dynamic Views. If you just install it without tweaks, it automatically includes a little menu that allows readers to bork with your layout by choosing cute options like "flipcard" and "magazine", thus displaying your posts in different arrangements. I like the "timeslide" format (what you see on my blog) - it's why I chose Dynamic Views, but my particular content looks terrible in "flipcard" and I don't think much of some of the other options. I wanted to take that little menu away. "Timeslide" does this neat thing where it displays snippets of selected posts, but it also cuts off your blog post titles if they are longer than two or three words. More disturbingly, the awesome fishscale background and reddish colour theme that I love was only sometimes displaying. Half the time when I loaded my blog it would be this plain jane black thing that was quite ugly.

Blech.

When Andrew Leon kindly let me know that he couldn't comment on my blog any more, I was saddened, to say the least. I wondered how many other people had dropped by and couldn't comment. Boo Hoo!

I was totally prepared to go back to my old template. I logged in, and had a quick look at my stats.

My pageviews had gone up 400% from before I changed the template. Uh. Yeah. Four times more pageviews! My ego made a decision: I would be keeping Dynamic Views, but only if I could figure out a way to make it more reliable and make sure that readers could comment.

(Google claims in this post that the reason for the increase in pageviews is a product of the more accurate tracking system that is enabled for Dynamic Views. My sense is that DV is also more user-friendly. Win / win.)

Enter Southern Speakers, a blog about tweaking your Blogger blog by a fellow named Yoga. This blog is seriously the best thing. Yoga posts all kinds of simple, quick, cut-and-paste bits of HTML for you to stick into your template, along with complete instructions on how to do that. (He has tweaks for more traditional Blogger layouts as well as DV.) With his help I did the following:

I got Dynamic Views to display the full title of my posts on my main page, rather than cutting them off.

I wiped out the ability of the reader to pick different types of dynamic view, meaning that they have to stick with Timeslide.

I inserted adorable vertical lines between my page links in my header bar.

Most importantly, Yoga linked to this tutorial on how to force the Dynamic Views template to stop occasionally loading that ugly black plain jane version of the template - what Yoga calls the "Ghost Template"  This fix comes via Päivi and Santeri of Global Nomads. Yay!

So: if you have Dynamic Views installed, at the least I heartily recommend that last fix, especially if you've found, like I did, that your pageviews have gone up since you installed Dynamic Views, but your comments have dropped. It's possible your readers can't comment! Tragic!

A special plea: If you're reading this and you're not seeing a comments form or the reddish fishscale pattern on my main page, PLEASE LET ME KNOW: elizabethtwist at gmail dot com. Thanks! 

ETA: As per L.G.'s complaint about the black gadget dock menu thinger overlapping the scroll bar on the righthand side, I've used this fix to move it to the left where it shouldn't interfere with the scroll bar any more. Thanks for the feedback, L.G.!

Recent Readings, Featuring Ink by Sabrina Vourvoulias

It's been a busy last little while in my reading world. I realize I've developed an obsession with the Song of Ice and Fire series - reading I started because I wanted to go through the books before Dave and I watched the television series. (Writer's pro tip: It is fascinating from a craft perspective to see how the tv writers cope with all that source material. They do, in my opinion, a wonderful job of compressing the books down to suit budgetary and length needs while maintaining the spirit of the work.) Just finished A Storm of Swords. Good times.

As part of research for a new project I'm working on, I read Autobiography of an Execution by David R. Dow, about Dow's work as a defendant for people on death row in Texas. Interesting information about the inequity of the legal system on the ground, especially for those who can't afford to hire counsel. The primary defendant Dow profiles is a man (possibly innocent) whose court-appointed lawyer literally slept through his trial.

I finally tucked into Sabrina Vourvoulias's Ink last week. According to my Kindle's tracker, I read about 20% of it in one go, and zipped through the rest of it in three days. This is high-velocity storytelling, people. Here's a brief summary from her description page:

What happens when rhetoric about immigrants escalates to an institutionalized population control system? The near-future, dark speculative novel INK opens as a biometric tattoo is approved for use to mark temporary workers, permanent residents and citizens with recent immigration history – collectively known as inks.

I expected that Ink would be a dark future story of oppression akin to 1984 - and in many ways, it is. I didn't expect that the dark science at work in the story would be balanced with gorgeous magic. Vourvoulias has chosen to tell the story from multiple POVs, one of my favourite storytelling vehicles, since it enables a book to explore a central problem while engaging with the fact that different people have different investments and difficulties arising from that problem. In a lot of ways, this book is about perspective and about sharing the experience of those who are not usually given a voice in science fiction or elsewhere.

One of the best qualities of science fiction is its ability to perform political commentary. Ink is a book in that tradition.

Given recent revelations about the intensity of government surveillance, Ink couldn't be more timely. Given recent revelations about the dinosaur-like nature of certain science fiction and fantasy institutions (*cough* SFWA *cough*), Ink couldn't be more necessary.

Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories

Bombastic analysis of structure from the King of Gallows Humour. I hope you all are having a gorgeous weekend.

Kurt Vonnegut on the shapes of stories from Maria Popova on Vimeo.

Man of Steel: My Somewhat Superficial Reasons for Liking It

Dave and I saw Man of Steel last night. We both loathed the 2006 Superman Returns thinger. Superman as deadbeat dad: no thanks.

I hadn't read a single thing about MoS except that it was coming out, so I had zero expectations going in. I have to say I liked it a great deal. It was a true reboot / revisiting / retelling of major elements from the late 70s / early 80s Christopher Reeve Superman films, and probably major plot points from comics that I haven't read.

This may be entirely shallow of me, but for my money the best thing about those Christopher Reeve movies was the space goths, particularly Terence Stamp as General Zod:

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I mean, shit man. Wow. Not to mention Hot Chick and Big Dude:

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At its most basic level Man of Steel is a retelling of the Superman origin story plus the Zod plot. Great fine great. Sign me up!

On the Hot Mess side of things there are a ton of flashbacks, lovingly filmed in gauzy nostalgia-vision. Whether those work for you or bother you probably depends on how you feel about flashbacks. I think they did work to give Clark Kent a bit of depth, although not too much because hey, this is a Hollywood movie.

More confusing were the riffs on Communist art. Apparently, Krypton storytelling involves silvery montages that look basically like this:

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...but more racially exclusive. Weird.

There was also some rough bombastic acting at the beginning, but I figured maybe on planet Krypton, you have to be a little yelly if you want to get your point across.

Basically, I liked it more than most movies that are 90% CGI polygons flying around at a ludicrous speed. Henry Cavill is ridiculously easy to like for a guy who is also insanely handsome. I loved Amy Adams as Lois Lane, particularly since Lane gets to do more than be nosy and get rescued. No one is Terence Stamp but Michael Shannon is mesmerizing in his own right (watch Take Shelter and you'll appreciate what he can do). Good times.

Dreaming the Siberian Ice Maiden

Last night Dave and I watched this BBC documentary from the '90s about the Siberian Ice Maiden, a mummy excavated from a tomb of the Pazyryk, an ancient people of the region who traveled widely and used horses.

There are a lot of interesting things about the Pazyryk, but the draw for anthropologists is that their region has a large degree of permafrost. Some of their tombs filled with water and then froze, preserving the contents to an amazing degree. The Siberian Ice Maiden, a woman buried in the 5th century BCE according to the wiki on her, was unusual in that she was not a warrior - which some Pazyryk women were - nor a warrior's wife - these were buried with their husbands. Evidence of the tomb suggests she had a high status in her culture: there were many animal carvings buried with her, covered in gold leaf. Her coffin was unusually long - originally the team who excavated it thought there were two people in it. The length, however, was there to accommodate her three-foot-high headdress. Her tomb was accompanied by six horses, sacrificed in order that they could be buried with her.

The body itself was very well preserved. While the skin of the skull was gone, the arms and hands remained. Whoever she was in life, the Ice Maiden had received a number of incredibly gorgeous tattoos. Like all Pazyryk art - well represented in rock art and in the wooden carvings in Pazyryk tombs - they include fantastic stylized animals, particularly this red deer:

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According to paleoanthropologist John Hawks, the Ice Maiden tattoo is "the earliest known evidence of tattooing anywhere in the world." A quick look at other pieces of Pazyryk art gives a great window into the ways in which plants, animals, and people flow into each other. To my way of seeing, this is evidence of a culture, like many other native cultures worldwide, with a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of all the natural world.

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In the BBC documentary, the lead archaeologist on the dig talks about how the Ice Maiden was probably a "storyteller," although the wiki and all the evidence I could see suggested that she was a holy person - a shaman or priestess.

What had my ears twitching as we watched the show were the little details that the people working on the excavation reported. According to Jeanne Smoot, an American who was on the dig, many people had terrible dreams as the excavation continued. It's an uncanny thing, to dig up a dead body, but taking the body of someone so powerful has got to give you the wiggins.

Sadly, I didn't have an Ice Maiden dream last night, but Dave did. I asked him if he got any particular message but he said it was just the same thing he always felt when looking at the untombed dead: put me back. Apparently the Ice Maiden's been saying that kind of thing for a while, through the only means she could: in dreams, and through the failure of an engine of the helicopter that first took her away from her home. (Whether she caused that particular near-accident is up for debate, although in my experience the dead are capable of more than you'd think).

The people I really wonder about, though, are the people who have copied the Ice Maiden's tattoo design - and the design of other prominent mummies from Pazyryk tombs.

See lovely examples here:

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And here:

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I wouldn't mind doing a followup with these women to find out the impact these tattoos have had on them. (In my experience, there's always some consequence to getting inked, usually positive.) To mark your skin with such a powerful image is amazing, to say the least. I imagine you'd catch the odd whisper from the Ice Maiden herself. I wonder if it's changed their dreams.

The complete documentary is here, if you want to watch it.

Party Poopers and Productivity

I'm trying to learn Cantonese. I mention it because if you've ever dived into a new language, you know how tricky it can be. Cantonese is the most radically different language from English I've tried to learn. (I took French throughout grade school and high school; Latin was my language of choice in University.)

As tricky as it is to pick up tones and basic grammar of a language far removed from English, I can only imagine how hard it is to learn English, the ultimate mongrel tongue.

Exhibit A:



Unrelated: this article on productivity at Brain Pickings is making me rethink my previous thoughts on plodding vs. slumping. Although I write just about every day, I'm thinking it might be time to increase the frequency and duration. Work, Muse! Work!

"muted" by Jessica Bell

I met Jessica Bell via the A to Z of Coffin Hopping Blogfest or one of those. You know. Those things that bloggers and writers and writers who blog do. She writes speculative stuff, suspense stuff, and music. That music bit is important, because it is much of the reason why Jessica was exactly the right person to write "muted," her latest release through Vine Leaves Press.

Long story short, "muted" is, as the cover says, a short story in verse. Set in a dystopian future in which self-expression through art and dress and (as concerns the main character) music is strictly controlled, the story traces the crisis of Concetta, a singer who has ended up on the wrong side of the law.

"muted" is richly imagined. Jessica doesn't hold back on gory detail - something I always admire. As a science fiction piece, the story has a lot going for it, opening a world's worth of weird and terrible in its short length. The main thing here is the language, though. This is poetry, written by a musician, about a musician. As a whole, "muted" is about art and sacrifice. If you are looking for something that takes sci fi lyricism to its logical extreme, you could do worse. I liked it.