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As some of you may have noticed, there have already been some changes in the Swordsmith Index in recent weeks. This announcement provides details on the ongoing and planned updates for the Index. Macrons for long vowels When the first version of the Index was released nearly 3 years ago, a decision was made to give the ability to search and maintain data the highest priority. In order to facilitate that, all the names and terms were transformed to plain ASCII format (given the overall state of the internet technology at the time). There was some research done recently by Google which shows that Unicode is now widely adapted and supported across the Internet. This gave me reassurance that it's time to revise this decision. Since we migrated to a new platform 6 months ago, it is technologically feasible now to take another step forward and review the way Japanese names and terms are presented in Swordsmith Index and throughout the site. The proposed changes are also based on feedback from visitors and members of Nihonto Club. Most importantly names of smiths, schools, provinces, eras as well as signatures will now be presented using macrons (ō and ū) for long o and u. Submission guidelines for Japan-related articles in Wikipedia are worth to be adapted: Manual of Style (Japan-related articles). This change won't affect searching as both internal search and Google search can process macrons correctly (e.g. if we search for 'Bishu Osafune' it will find both 'Bishu Osafune' and 'Bishū Osafune'). This should make it easier to reconcile Rōmaji with Kanji, and also help non-Japanese readers with pronunciation. As this is (mostly) manual process, it will take a while to migrate the whole site with tens of thousands records into the new format. Archaic pronunciations Rōmaji for iye and suye (家, 末 and alternatives) will be replaced by modern forms ie and sue. E.g. Masaiye and Iyetsugu will be displayed and Masaie and Ietsugu. read more » |
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Swordsmith Index now allows filtering by Province and Era. Note: when filtering by Era, only traditional Nengō are available. It's currently not possible to filter by historical periods (e.g. Nanbokucho) or sword periods (Koto, Shinto etc). This is due to the fact that filtering works off the specified Start Era field in the smith record. Therefore filtering by Koto period will only show records with Start Era = Koto, and not any Koto smiths as one would expect. |
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Dear Members and Visitors, Major software upgrade is planned for the coming weekend. Nihonto Club web site will be available in read-only mode between Friday, 11 September 2009 19:00 GMT and Sunday, 13 September 2009 22:00 GMT. You won’t be able to post comments or add new content. Image Gallery will be unavailable. Smith search is not affected. This is a big step forward which took almost a year and a half to prepare. It opens up possibilities for adding new features and services. More detailed list of changes to follow. Apologies for any inconvenience it may have caused. Regards, |
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Ever wondered if one day you could just:
All this is possible with modern technologies. In fact, I have most of it up and running since Christmas on my home server. Have a quick look here: A web crawler is running at designated times through a set of well-known Nihonto related sites, and results are available through Multisite search within NihontoClub. It also covers Nihonto Club site itself, providing much higher quality searching facilities (let's be honest, NC built-in search isn't great - it doesn't even recognise word variations). You may see how many times the phrase was found on each of the targeted seb sites, filter by site, etc (see the screenshot). There's one downside: it needs more power. In order to make it usable just for one person, I'd need almost twice as powerful web hosting (which means higher running costs). I'm working on a fully automated version now, which will be available some time before the end of the year (sorry folks, too many real life committments) and it's going to be hosted on my home server with free access from the main website. It won't be fast, there may be downtime, but I hope you may find it useful. |
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Nihonto Club can now be found on Twitter (@NihontoClub). Follow us to get the most up-to-date information about the site. |
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Dear Members and Guests, I'm delighted to inform you that NihontoClub.Com has moved to a new server which offers greater stability and performance (for just a little greater price). It's been tough few weeks for me as our former hosting company (BlueHost.com) was blocking the site without warning, claiming it was causing performance issues on the server. Due to their rude and inconsiderate approach I decided not to contest this claim but move all the sites to a different hosting provider. And I can tell you, it's been great so far. It's a VPS (virtual private server), not shared hosting. The site shows much faster response, there is no lag at peak times. Also, using an opportunity to spend some time with the test site I've made quite a few changes which were planned long time ago, but kept being delayed as I would have had to bring the live site down for a while to apply them. After running the site for almost 2 years by now I have a pretty good idea which resources are popular and which aren't. Some areas like Glossary and Weblink Directory remained too heavy and clunky to use, with few redundant or unnecessary features. This also affected the overall site performance. read more » |
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Nihonto Club wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! |
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Due to increasing number of user registrations from automated spam scripts, additional checks & trials have been added to critical areas of the site in order to distinguish valid users from spam bots. If you experience any issues with these verification procedures, please contact Nihonto Club administration using this form.
Kind Regards, |
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