Roadworks on the Swordschool Platform, and some woodwork too!

Hi!

I hope the new year is treating you well. I’m jetting off to Potsdam this weekend for the Torneo di Spada: if you see me there, say hello!

At the moment I’m working full time on a huge, tedious job: a ground-up reboot of the open-access Swordschool wiki.

It has been woefully neglected over the last many years, during which time I’ve produced literally hundreds of videos that really belong on there. So, I’m adding a ton of new content, and reorganising everything along the following lines:

Distinguishing between Interpretation and Training
Within those categories organising the material by historical master, weapon, difficulty level, and other factors.
The goal is to make it both comprehensive and easy to navigate.

I believe that the Art is everyone’s birthright, and does not belong behind a paywall. I am getting back to basics and getting all my interpretation work out there where people can use it. This is why my translations of Il Fior di Battaglia and De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi are already distributed for free, and I’ve got about 400 public videos on my vimeo account. Just getting it out there is not enough though- to be useful it needs to be organised. This is why we have the Syllabus Wiki.

But I still have to feed my children, so people who want the material organised into user-friendly books and courses are welcome to buy them.

And of course, my patrons directly support the free content financially.

I’ve also been giving a lot of thought to platforms in general. At the moment my attention is divided between Patreon, the blog, SwordPeople, the podcast, the newsletter, and a bunch of other ways to interact with my readers. I think I have things straight in my head now. What do you think of this?

Patreon is for sharing things to first, and to allow people who care to support the work I’m making freely available.
Publishing platforms such as the blog and the wiki are for creating permanent libraries of free content. The podcast fits in here as well.
Teachable and the Shop are for selling training courses and books.
SwordPeople is for conversation and discussion.
This Newsletter is for distributing curated content.

I think the reason I’ve dithered so long about bringing the wiki up to scratch is that it’s really, really nitpicky. And I have to type things like [link], and { {#ev:vimeo|xxx} } and it does my head in. But it’s worth it, because it’s already taking shape as a more useful resource. For instance this:

Became this:

Note the page organisation, the addition of the image, the new categories (for navigation), the renaming (also for navigation). Take a look at the home page, and dig around a bit, and let me know what you think!

This made me think that my 500+ blog posts are really poorly categorised and tagged. The whole thing really needs re-organising, with hub pages to make it easy for people to find the things they’re interested in. It’s not as if I was already really busy… but yes I’m doing that too.

To make the wiki work properly, I’m in the process of migrating both the blog and the swordschool main site and wiki to a new host. My current host is WPEngine, which is fine for WordPress, but clunky as all hell for the MediaWiki install. So we’re moving lock, stock, and barrel over to Webarchitects, a UK-based co-operative hosting service. So far their support has been top-notch.

But all this is a lot of fiddly computery stuff. So I need to get my hands dirty…

Productive Procrastinations

About a year ago I upgraded my desk with a solid wood worksurface and a bit of fancy joinery. If you missed it, you can read about it here.

Over the course of the year it got a bit grubby, and picked up some moisture which raised the grain. So I re-finished the area from the front edge to about a foot in. This would have meant losing the signatures I got my kids to write on it with sharpies, so I got them to re-do their marks with my pyrography machine.

You can tell that I really don’t want to do the next thing on my computery to-do list when I actually disassemble my keyboard for cleaning.

Do not dwell on the filth. Dwell on the fact that the filth is now gone!

If you’ve been following along with my alcohol restriction, dexa scan visceral fat/cholesterol stuff, you may recall that diterpenes in coffee can raise LDL cholesterol, but are filtered out by paper filters. This has lead me to start using small round paper filters in my espresso machine. They come in horrid little packets, so I’ve been taking sanity-preserving breaks from wiki and blog edits to nip out to my shed and cut up bits of wood. The first such project is a holder for the filters. It’s in brown oak that grew in my garden (for 200 years or so, before being killed by a shed fire before we bought the property. I had it felled and sawn into usable planks), and ash. Nothing fancy, and note to self: hole cutting saws make awful substitutes for a Forstner bit and a pillar drill. But as I don’t have a pillar drill or a 52mm Forstner bit, I had to improvise.

On The Sword Guy podcast: From Homeschool to Author, with Amos Wilson

Amos Christian Wilson is an independent Christian author, poet and musician. He is also a home school graduate and third born of 12 who loves reading, the outdoors, theology and history. He went from high school to a wide range of trade jobs, from carpentry to piano tuning to horse shoeing. He seeks to write books which centre around religious characters and immersive world building.

In our conversation we talk about growing up as one of 12 and being homeschooled, and how a picture book about arms and armour sparked Amos’s love of swords, followed by a Fiore manual from a homeschool organisation’s catalogue of “toys for growing men”.

We talk about some of the different jobs Amos has done over the years to support his true career as a writer. He describes his four-book Gwambi series as Treasure Island meets Chronicles of Narnia, with maybe a little bit of Charles Dickens thrown in there.

As Amos isn’t a historical martial artist, he has a different idea of what he would do with $1 million, and it’s one that I found fascinating.

To the podcast!

cheers,

Guy