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Erin, this is for you but I want others to see your answer.
With some trepidation, I am considering doing following the recomendations of another author who has strongly suggested that I re-adress "Changed by Aliens", and combine it into a single file. I say "with trepidation" simply because I am lazy. :) With no one to spank me, it is hard to maintain focus. :) Giggle.
So, I thought there had been a discussion sometime ago regarding file size and I thought it was decided that 100k was a practical size limit here.
At one time, I also thought that my computer started getting weird after that number.
Will you please refresh my memory?
Khadija Gwen Brown
File sizes
Truthfully, BC can handle some enormous files, one story here is 700k+. That doesn't mean that everyone can download such a file because of limitations of their internet connection. It also depends on how it is stored. There are three ways to store a story on BC.
1. Upload the story file via the "link" button at the bottom of the story body input box. This is how I do it for Tuck, and it preserves whatever file structure you may have. TXT, PDF, RTF or DOC files as well as JPG and GIF files can be uploaded this way. Maximum file size for Authors is 1 MEG! unless you ask me for special permission to upload a larger file. Non-authors cannot use this method.
2. Paste a story into a Fiction-type story body input box. File size limit is again about 1 MEG but the actual storage of the file may be bigger or smaller that whatever file existed on your local home drive. This is because Drupal reformats pasted text before storing it. Pasting from a Word document adds 10%-50% to the size of a file, also, because Word puts in a lot of invisible garbage.
3. For people using the Wysiwyg editor who have membership type AuthorW, they can paste a story into a Wysiwyg-type story body input box. File size limit is again about 1 MEG but the actual storage of the file will almost always be BIGGER that whatever file existed on your local home drive. This is because the Wysiwyg editor reformats pasted text then Drupal reformats it again. One of them is almost sure to make the file bigger. Fortunately, the Wysiwyg editor is smarter about Word files and cuts the additional garbage from Word by about half.
Stories stored by method 1 above have the size noted in the link that appears for downloading, people can see what they are getting into before downloading.
Methods 2 and 3 start trying to download and display as soon as you open the story, so the only clue you have to size is the rough word count given in the categories.
1000 words is about 6.5k. So, a 40,000 word short novel is about 250K.
A Tuck chapter is about 8000-9000 words which works out to 53k-60k.
15,000 words comes out to about 100k by method 1. About 12,000 words equals 100k by method 2,or 10,000 words if pasting from Word. By method 3, it could actually be twice that much. This is why I turn on the Wysiwyg editor only for people who ask for it. :)
So -- chunks of about 10,000 to 15,000 words are fairly convenient for most people downloading. Except that in the middle of the day, it can get hairy on a dial-up connection.
Personally, I usually keep my chapters to 3000 to 8000 words and single chunk stories to less than 15,000.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Much to my astonishment!
I knew my system was 2.6 gig, but I was very surprised to find that my memory is only 512K. The machine is about 6 years old and while it works fine right now, I would not be surprised if it quit tomorrow.
It will likely be a few months before a new machine graces my desk. The man who does a web page for an organization I am with, told me that now days 3 gig of memory is a minimum.
Many Blessings
Gwen
3 gig?
if you use Vista you probably need that much for Solitaire, yeah. But actually that's ridiculous. I have a 512MB machine here that I keep for writing. It's slow by the standards of my other machines but it's fine for *writing*, and has my best original IBM Model M keyboard on it, and discourages self-distracting (especially as it's actually too slow to play flash movies, for instance). That's Linux, and only a 500MHz CPU in there too, which is a greater performance bottleneck than the small (in modern terms) amount of memory; there's a Mac used as a TV that has 1GB (used to have two but a memory socket died), a mac laptop (also used for writing) which has 2GB, and my main work Linux PC (also used for writing) that has 4GB in a desktop with *all* the bells and whistles, but that only uses a fraction of its memory for real stuff; the rest is just used for filesystem caching as it's my media server. (It's also only 2.6GHz (though dual-core) and that's *plenty* fast enough; it's still the fastest machine in my collection, and as a Java developer for enterprise customers I can promise my needs for actual computing performance are greater than a "man who does a web page".)
2GB seems to be a common amount to put in new midrange systems these days. For the purposes of a machine to write on, it's still wildly extravagant... unless you use Vista. Even Windows XP should be quite happy in 512MB. And to be honest I bet even Vista isn't really *that* bad; rather that having that much memory and speed just makes it take longer to slow down with the inevitable weight of viruses and trojans and spambots it collects. Cheaper to have a system that doesn't collect those.
I have a friend who gets a nice new PC every year that someone else throws out thinking it's broken or "too slow" when in fact it's often just laden with viruses. She wipes it and puts Linux on it and has a very capable just-behind-the-curve machine. In fact I think her current PC is faster than mine, but she uses it to make music so that's okay.
Seriously, unless you know the machine is *physically* failing, it probably just needs a reinstall - preferably with a better operating system. :-) but even a Windows XP reinstall would probably help.
hehe, thinking about it...
Your "man who does a web page" who thinks that 3GB is a minimal configuration. Ask him if he'll give you his previous machine. He'll probably say it's broken and too slow, but take it anyway and install Ubuntu on it. :-D
I used to like Windows
But then I decided i wanted to DO something with a computer. I'm currently doing my writing on an old Compaq at work with a 500 Mhz processor and 192 Mb RAM running 98SE and it's more than enough to serve as a word processor.
Melanie E.
hehe, yeah
... it's true to say that the hardware requirements for writing are ridiculously low. Really, if it still works, any computer made in the last 20 or so years (yes that's twenty) should be completely capable of any writing you want to do. And I only stop that recently because before then it could be hard to get the software. (Twenty-ish years ago I was writing with my BBC Model B in WordWise Plus and later InterWord, including a play I directed at sixth-form. That's a better output than I'm managing now. It helps that Beebs had nice keyboards too...)
I believe Tuck is written - or was until very recently - using a DOS-based wordprocessor. As a f'rinstance.
I remind myself of these things because one's computer hardware is almost never an excuse to not get the writing done. :-)
In fact it's all getting a bit retro these days, with the appearance of simple wordprocessors for modern OSes that take you to a plain full-screen environment devoid of distractions. The original seems to be WriteRoom on the Mac, with imitators appearing elsewhere, like Darkroom for Windows, PyRoom for Linux/Unix (can probably be made to work on Windows and OS X too) and JDarkRoom for Java, all doing pretty much the same thing: Hiding away the email client and the IM client and the IRC client and YouTube and iPlayer and your RSS feed reader and the buttons and gizmos and swooshy window effects and the music player (although you can still play the music of course) and just giving you a screen with your text and a cursor to type at.
It's so refreshing. I make the text white, not green, as green has no nostalgia value for me. (In those Beeb days I used a little 12" white monochrome monitor. I *loved* it.)
I really have no excuses for my current lack of output. :-)
PC nostalgia
I had a BBC micro as well, a great little machine. My first PC was an Amstrad 2086 which had an Intel 8086 CPU running at 8Mhz, with 640kb RAM and a 30Mb hard drive. It's hard to remember how you could do anything with such limited resources, but that was before Windows took off. I used it mostly for writing little programs in Turbo Pascal. The PC itself was pretty horrible for the price, no wonder Sir Alan made such a lot of money!
The only reason I run Windows at home these days is for Photoshop, otherwise I would run Linux, as that is what I use most of the time at work.
Thanks for the links Rachel, I'll take a look at Darkroom, though I do agree about the green text!
I beg to differ!
Why, even at the tender age of 21 I have a special place in my heart for ol' monochrome green. I remember when my uncle purchased a brand new 386 and an SVGA monitor for my Grammy so she could play Doom. It was also our family's first Windazed machine, 3.1.
Melanie E.
PS our primary work computers work off a copy of BOS from 1984, and are mono- yellow displays.
My first *PC* as such
... was an AMD K6-2 machine at the end of 1998, having stuck with Acorn machines until then. Acorn (makers of the BBC micro) lasted, in useful form, just about to the time when Linux was becoming usable, with the help of someone determined to pull me onto that platform, so although I've tended to have a windows VM around for occasional work purposes (testing stuff in IE for instance) I've never had to become a Windows User, as such. :-)
It's funny; Mac OS X now seems much more like a successor to RISC OS of the late nineties than it does to the Mac OS of that era (which I never liked), with pretty much the sole exception of the menubar at the top rather than the contextual-menu-for-everything approach that RISC OS took.
I'd say I stayed with Acorn to the bitter end, but I didn't. In fact, Google tells me the bitter end is still playing out, Amiga-style. I bailed just before the local education authorities did (flooding the 2nd hand market), so I actually got a decent price for my last Risc PC. :-)