A Divine Problem


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: http://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.

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