DiVine - a community for and by people with a disability
 
I
have had a busy couple of weeks thanks mainly to the Divine website that I
write for. Two weeks ago we were told by Divine that the website was being
moved onto a new server, and they were taking the opportunity to archive all pre-2013
stories. Twenty-four articles of my stories would no longer be viewable. And
some of them were very good. I was not that impressed.
I
had been under the impression that the articles I wrote would be on the web for
at least as long as Divine existed (I hold my breath each time a state budget
comes along and at the end of each financial year). If Divine stopped
operating, I hoped that the Office for Disability, which owns the website, would
keep my articles viewable.    
I
contacted the editor by email and on the phone to express my disappointment. I
was told that most online publications end up archiving much of their content.
Just over 750 stories are on Divine at the moment, so to make the site more manageable
pre-2013 stories need to be archived. But 24 of them are mine!
I
made suggestions, like each writer nominating two of their own pre-2013 stories
to stay on the site, but that went nowhere. Many of the other Divine writers
expressed their unhappiness in an extended email exchange. I feel particularly
for those writers who have not written for Divine since the beginning of 2013.
But
rather than get angry or depressed or both, I have been working on a solution where
readers and potential employers can still read my work. I have decided to put
the articles up on my own website. I have 24 articles to play with so I could create
a divine Divine section on my site.
I
saved screen shots of all the affected articles, and tried to copy them onto my
website using my website provider’s primitive website builder. I quickly found
out it was not going to be that easy. After baulking at the $399 price of an
up-to-date version of Dreamweaver (which I had used to create the original
site), I reinstalled Dreamweaver 2004 on to my computer. Surprisingly it still
seems to work.

After a bit of fiddling in Dreamweaver, I was able to copy the saved source
code from one of my Divine articles into my website provider’s website builder.
After more fiddling, this is the result:
https://grahamclements.com/freelance%20writing/a%20novel%20approach%20to%20writing.html
What
do you think?
So
far my attempts to get the text to wrap around the picture have failed. I can wrap
the text using Dreamweaver, but the formatting does not stick when I transfer
the source code to my website.

0 Responses

  1. Graham, is there no way to import your pieces into Blogger? Or maybe you shoud consider replacing your website with a self-hosted WordPress blog? Either way, wouldn't moving your articles to a blog be easier by far than moving them to a website you have to build for yourself?

  2. Graham,

    I have been fiddling with blogger too. I just think that setting the articles up on a webpage with an easy to read contents section might be a better way to go. I will continue to fiddle with both anyway. I have a discontinued wordpress blog, found it very annoying to use – I frequently have trouble viewing wordpress blog pages, don't know why. Thanks for the suggestions though. Another friend has suggested I consider making an ebook on smashwords of the articles. I think I might try that if I can get a few of the other Divine writers interested and then if I can get permission from Divine to do it.

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