OK, time for that tricky second page.. the bane of all pretentious writerly types out there in the blagosphere (hello brothers and sisters).
I had a bit of fun trimming all the superfluous verbiage from the original – I’m sure there’s a simpler way of saying that. There’s the implicit irony of using the “Hemingway” layout – I’m keen to slim this so-called novel down as much as possible, let it travel light and fast. As it happens I’ve been reading ‘The Old Man and the Sea’. Terse? Ernest was a C coder!
Joking aside, I do actually want you to read this story and enjoy it – I’d like it to be a ‘page turner’, as much as an online novel can be. An interesting convention I’ve played with before is to use the last few words on a page as the link to the next. It’s the closest approximation to a page turning experience I can think of.. when you come to the end of the page the last phrase is the trigger for going to the next page.. the loading time the little mental breath you take when you turn the page..
The implementation is deadly simple:
He hadn't read a complete book in years, but was still interested in <%= link_to 'opening lines', :action=> 'opening_lines' %>.
I’m using a link_to but it may get converted into a helper method later. This style of navigation may become unwieldy past a few pages, but we’re not there yet. As you may have noticed, I’m deferring all the hard stuff until I actually know I need to worry about it.
OK, we’re a few hundred miles away from making a general purpose CMS. But the spec has changed.
Have a look, tell me if it works for you:
