Disastrous History of the original web site.

[HanshiClayton]

This is the second incarnation of Bruce Clayton's Shotokan's Secret website. The first one died a painful death and was deemed not worth the effort of resurrection. The original website was called ShotokanResearch.com.

Shotokan Research was established in 2004 following the publication of Shotokan's Secret, the First Edition (Black Belt Books), as a forum for discussion of the topics in that book. Membership was kept low, limited to about two dozen senior black belts, and in fact most of the postings were offered by Sensei Clayton, assisted by Sensei Gary Simpson and Sensei Colin Wee, both of Australia. All three are senior blackbelts who have cross-trained in hard-style karate and in grappling (aikido and jujutsu).

Just as the site was gaining momentum, we got hacked by a teenager in Indonesia. This prompted our ISP to hide the forum behind a server password challenge, effectively taking it off the web except to a very few members. For the next three years, development continued in private.

Then the ISP suffered staffing and equipment changes that resulted in shutting down our site, reducing our forums to the form of an obsolete SQL database dump. The postings are available for research in a grossly awkward format, not easily reconstituted. After some attempts to recover from backups, it was deemed better to install a new bulletin board and rebuild.

One reason for starting over was that Kyoshi Clayton's knowledge of the applications in the Shotokan katas had grown enormously over the four years, and many of the early postings about kata applications were no longer considered valuable. Some of the essays, however, were worth posting again in a more stable environment. Enormous progress has been made in interpreting the Shotokan katas in the meantime.

And therefore in December 2008 we began again.

[HanshiClayton]

A follow-up on the trials and tribulations of a phpBB administrator. I recently changed the look of the site by switching to an attractive (I thought) new style. A month went by, and it occurred to me that no one had opened a new user account.

I checked, and sure enough the registration page for the style was broken. Users were locked out.

I have switched to a less-attractive skin that actually works. There's a life lesson there someplace.

[HanshiClayton]

Continuing trauma...

At one point I needed to transfer large files to other senseis, so I had the ISP set up an FTP site under my account. This involved having a dedicated IP address all my own. Somehow this address got added to many of the internal links between pages on the site. Then, of course, I decided to stop using the FTP site and we went back to DNS addressing for the links --- meaning that many of the internal links were now broken. Even worse, in the meantime the DNS name of the site changed from shotokanresearch.com to shotokanssecret.com, which broke all of the remaining links.

There are hundreds of topics, and hundreds of broken links. Arrrrgh.

I'm fixing them as fast as I can, but if you see one, just drop me an email. Thanks.