Ever wondered if one day you could just:

• search your favourite trusted sword related sites for information about some smith or school?
• get a list or an RSS feed of all Nhonto articles published this week?
• look at new items available for sale today from your trusted dealers on one page?
• Get notified when Kotetsu is for sale again from Aoi Art (or any other seller)?

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.

I have aquired another Wakizashi, pics on page 2 of my gallery. It is said to be Nobuyoshi, but not sure of era, school, date etc. I have included pics of 2 documents that came with the Wakizashi, but (blush blush!) they may be upside down. Any info appreciated.

Baz

Nihonto Club can now be found on Twitter (@NihontoClub). Follow us to get the most up-to-date information about the site.

Some of you might have noticed that photos weren't showing up when uploading them into Image Gallery. This has been fixed now. Images uploaded in the past which had broken thumbnails are now appearing correctly.

Apologies to all the users who had issues with uploading.

Regards,
Stan

There's been the following announcement on eBay site:

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/uk/200902231205572.html

This means no more bargains for Irish and British collectors and researchers, thanks to Government's inability to fight crime.  read more »

Official Launch date Feb 16th, 2009
Items available for sale Sunday, March 8th at 12 noon exactly

RealNihonto.com is an online retail shop for nihonto and nihonto accessories. The owner, Mr. Christian T. Chaffee has been studying Japanese art swords for 20 years and has retained some of the most remarkable pieces he has come across for his own collection.

The site is also aimed at education and appreciation of the fine art of handmade swords. So please visit the site and enjoy viewing video and high resolution photography. read more »

The Japanese Centre Northern Ireland has announced on their web page:

TENSHIN SHODEN KATORI SHINTO RYU BUJUTSU
OTAKE SENSEI COURSE IN IRELAND
FIRST TIME EVER IN EUROPE SINCE 1980

ALL WELCOME

The course is from Saturday the 2nd to Thursday 7th May 2009 in Coleraine N Ireland. any Belfast airport will be ok. Dublin is fine but 2hrs train
journey. From any airport then train or bus from Central Station Belfast to Coleraine.  read more »

Dear Members,

There had been issues recently with sending activation emails to new accounts.

If you didn't receive a welcome email after creating a new account at NihontoClub.com please use Request New Password form or contact me directly.

Kind Regards,
Stan Nazarenko

Reading Japanese names is not easy. Reading a name from 500 years old sword tang is significantly more difficult. But even when the kanji is read, what is the correct way to pronounce it and, subsequently, put it in romaji? Not just various Kanji symbols may have different readings in names, but some smiths preferred non-standard readings, or Chinese form instead of Japanese form. Is it Akitoshi or is it Myoju? (an example from Hawley himself) It may be a source of great confusion, especially for non-Japanese students with good, limited or even no knowledge of the Japanese language.

Luckily, specialized reference literature helps to find answers. The reader may just open Hawley's book and look up the right name. But is it as unambiguous and easy? The answer is no. Even the same name in kanji may have different readings (and records) in Hawley's and they won't be the ones which are easy to find either. First of all, we shouldn't forget that Willis Hawley was using paper notes, cards and a typewriter to compile his monumental book. It didn't allow machine validation which we enjoy in present days, insertion and modification was difficult and error-prone. Some duplicate records were added (and then found). Then, Hawley himself may have (consciously or unconsciously) put some records multiple times under different pronunciations. And finally, some smiths may have changed their names themselves leaving the honour of recording it to Nihonto historians. read more »

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 »