Hi folks
The recent discussion on this has prompted me to move forward a project I’ve had in mind for some time. As I said in the discussion, I think a comprehensive site on many areas of piping is needed, including articles, photos, histories, drawings, plans, etc. A wiki will be included. Not just about pipemaking, it would ultimately be the reference site for all pipers, of any hue. It might include major public domain tune collections, such as transcriptions of the 19th century piobaireachd MSS for GHBers, and stuff like O’Neill’s collections. There would be articles on every aspect of piping. Hopefully, we could build online tutorials for pipers, which could be updated to reflect beginner feedback easily. The possibilities are wide.
Of course, in practice it will end up being GHB, Uilleann, Northumbrian, and SSP/border pipe centric, but that’s life. Hopefully, we can build up a sum of knowledge greater than the parts (or something).
Such projects don’t always last. Because of that, I’d to like to license all the content under one of the Creative Commons licences; the Attribution-ShareAlike license seems ideal. Their page on it:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/
Basically, the original authors must be attributed, but modification and distribution are allowed, provided all published modifications come under the same license.
To get the ball rolling, I’ve taken on a small server, which has a couple of gigs of space or so and fifteen gigs of bandwidth (precludes lots of media files for now, but bandwidth gets cheaper with time (or donations)). I’ve also registered a domain - everythingbagpipe.org, which seems suitably all-encompassing. I’m experimenting at the moment with getting a wiki up and running - I’ve got MediaWiki, which powers Wikipedia, running on my own computer, so getting it powered up on the remote server shouldn’t be too hard. I need to do some more research to get the whole thing hardened up security-wise, but other than that it’s more or less ready to go. I’ve not yet pointed the domain at the server (I’ll probably move registrars when I do), but in the meantime I’d like to get a beta site up on the IP address.
If anyone’s interested, I’d suggest we knock together a mailing list, and get a rough skeleton bashed out. Although I have some HTML, I’m no wizard. If it’s navigable, valid, and clean, I’m happy. Although that’s no bad thing.
One thing this site won’t be is a discussion site. This place, Bob Dunsire, Usenet, all these provide much better discussion facilities. What I would like this site to be is something that can stop discussion boards becoming an endless round of the same topics (“My reed doesn’t work!”). Hopefully it can become a fertile ground for continually sowing new discussion, and that discussion can then feed back into the site itself. The only exception would be the wiki, where each page has a related discussion page where the flame wars can be fought without damaging the usefulness of the page.
Thoughts, criticisms, contributions, etc, all welcome, here, by PM, or by email - calum@callingthetune.co.uk
Cheers,
Calum