14meters fencing blog

Previously, http://test.14meters.com went to the collaborative referee test.  I decided to co-opt it for other purposes.  Now, http://test.14meters.com contains the most up-to-date version of the code that I’m willing to release to the public.  It is most likely full of bugs, but if you want to see where I’m going with things, you’ll find it there.  Once I feel I’ve achieved a stable release, I’ll copy it over to http://14meters.com and people can start to actually use things.

Just wanted to keep people up to date with the process.  Expect more frequent blog posts about what I’m trying to do now that I have some free time to work on things.

So, I’m in the middle of developing something for fun, but I realize that I want to also release this to the public-at-large.  

I’m (slowly) building an online fencing journal applicaiton.  The point of it would to compliment and perhaps eventually replace the standard paper-based fencing journal.   The intent is to build something that will work as an analytic/statistics tool, as well as a lookup tool.

With respect to statistics and analytics, I feel that the biggest shortcoming with your standard journal is that you have to sit down and analyze the notes yourself to produce meaningful results.  Its fairly easy to do mental justifications about trends and therefore discard or twist the results of the analysis.  Instead, if you can plug in the raw facts into an application and have it spit out graphs, data and objective conclusions, it becomes easier to objectively critique your own fencing.

With respect to lookup, I don’t intend on building a big, universal fencer database.  That would be excessive, offputting, and a little intrusive, I believe.  The intent would be for someone to be able to search their own notes, information, and experiences against a specific fencer via a mobile application.  Just an easy way to access all of your past notes, do a search on a fencer you’re about to fence, and see the culmination of how they’ve fenced you in the past.  It would give you better insight into what you’ve done wrong, or what they’ve done right with respect to fencing you in the past.

Anyone have any thoughts/suggestions/etc.?

Due to a massive lack of participating going on with the main 14m application and the upkeep/headaches/overhead it requires to keep it running, I’ve made the decision to take it down.  Too bad, really.  I liked the concept, but the community was unsustainable.  Only approximately 1% of the live traffic actually did anything to participate in the system.

So, I’m kind of up in the air about what to mold the site into.  I have a plan, but I feel like I could make it happen no matter what, regardless of what else I do.  Anyone have any thoughts?

While not exactly complete in any respects of the word, 14meters is, for the most part, fully functional.  With the Olympics coming up, we figured that this would be a good time to make it no longer a stealth project.  Although we, ourselves, will not be waving any banners or advertising it, we would definitely appreciate any word of mouth that our few current users would be willing to provide.

Right now, the site is still, clearly, under construction.  It is based on the now Open Source Reddit code, which is still very new, messy, and designed to work specifically for Reddit.  Splitting out the Reddit-specific stuff will take some time and effort.  Please bear with us, as changes will be small but frequent.  If there’s any down time, we messed up, and it will be back online ASAP.  If the main site is ever down, this blog should still be up.

With that, I think the biggest question to answer is “whats the point of this site?” or “why did you build it?”.  To put it simply, there are a lot of places to find good information on the sport of fencing, but no modern, central, up-to-date repository for that information.  We’re not here intending to step on any toes and we’re not here to be the resource for new fencers.  We’re here to try and make finding and disseminating information on fencing easier and quicker.  Probably the biggest example of potential benefits would be bringing news stories from around the country and the world to the forefront, directing traffic to them, thereby indicating interest and potentially prompting more reporting and general interest in the sport.  NBC is definitely tracking traffic and interest in the sport on their Olympics page.  It is up to us to show them that the sport deserves more coverage.