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.?

Now open for business is a simple Collaborative Referee Test.

It works like this: it displays a random question. You pick and submit your answer, and it adds your answer in to the answer pool. Then, on the next page, the previous question is re-displayed with a count next to each answer showing how many people have picked that answer as the correct answer.

The test works like this because there is no official (public?) answer key to the referee test. So, there’s no “right” answer publicly available. The collaborative nature of the test is to try and point people in the right direction, as well as show which answers are most confusing.

The test itself is currently not designed to track which questions have been taken already. I’m definitely willing to take questions/comments/etc. and will improve the test based on input I receive. I think the top two requests so far are “right answers”, which may or may not be possible/reliable, and tracking for questions to ensure all are taken with minimal repeats.

So, after taking a look at pageviews and traffic and such, by far, the most popular venture we’ve done here has been the one post about the fencing shoes (link). Go figure. Even moreso than the main application.

So, in the spirit of that, I’m throwing up a simple, hopefully useful, Fencing Shoes product blog (click here to visit).

The purpose is short and sweet - I’m going to try and throw up a post about every popular shoe used for fencing, what people think about them, and where to buy them. The mini-blog in the upper right-hand corner is for special deals. For example, Adidas occasionally has 20% off sales, Amazon does shoe sales, and the individual vendors all have special deals that they throw around. I’m going to try and keep on top of those things and post them in that section. I don’t anticipate any deals to overlap, but if you subscribe to the RSS feed of the blog, you’ll see everything, overlap or not.

Enjoy

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?