The future of Wood Central (and all woodworking media)

Re: The future of Wood Central (and all woodworking media)

I have been pleased to see that younger people and women are joining our woodworkers club (Albuquerque Woodworkers Assn).  It used to be that there were hardly any members under 60.  We are also blessed to have a department of fine woodworking at the Santa Fe Community College.  Students there range from 18 to 80+.  It's wonderful to have such a range of people sharing ideas.  So reach out and see who might be in your community!

Re: The future of Wood Central (and all woodworking media)

Hi Joe,

I've resisted answering your question because I don't have hard figures to rely on. Certainly our boomer generation is on the way out, but woodworking and hand skills are going to keep going in some way, shape or form. It also seems likely that YouTube videos are becoming the preferred source of how-to information, at the expense of print magazines and forums, although I've heard that digital magazines are increasing in popularity.

I think the bigger question is how will woodworking evolve in response to the realities of the 21st century? Will more people want to learn how to make things for themselves? Will they still be willing and able to afford the sophisticated tools and machinery we enjoy today, or will they make do with less, and what does that portend for the future of woodworking information, including forums, magazines and new forms of digital media? 

The only thing I know is that woodworking will most certainly evolve, and it may look a lot different to the next generation. We need to figure out how best to provide relevance and inspiration to the woodworkers of the future.

All discussion is most welcome.

Ellis

Re: The future of Wood Central (and all woodworking media)

I sent an email to Fine Woodworking a few weeks ago complaining about all the simple operation photos they have been using. In issue 302 there was 25 pictures of either drilling holes or driving screws. One article was building an open sided box from MDF to make a very simple router table. They put in 12 pictures of her drilling holes or driving screws. Even one of Chris Becksvoort screwing a shelf piece to the wall. Of course the gallery was fantastic as always. I asked if the new generation of woodworkers are at such a skill level that they need to see all those kind of pictures, and if the magazine staff missed the disconnect between the gallery and all those fluff pictures. They sent me a return email asking if they could print it. I'm really interested at what the reply will be like. I was just one of a lot of craftsman that trained on FWW and quit our corporate jobs to do woodworking. I just don't see that returning for quite a long time. 

I remember when FWW first did a colour cover, and later, whole colour issues. Inevitably, they got push back from crazies who thought it was the beginning of the end. And as usual, they turned out to be right.   FWW jumped the shark several decades ago. And I don't blame them, (along with Ellis), they basically created the form, yet when woodworking got big, they were not there to get the crusts. So they had a choice to make. Comic books it was. It probably was in the greater good. Similar phenomenon as to when the eggheads complained that email was getting too popular.

This topic was bumped because I edited a reply that wasn’t displaying correctly due to legacy HTML that no longer works. Any edit is treated by the system as new activity, which moves the topic back into the list of recently active threads.

Interestingly, this ties in somewhat with Brad’s recent post, so it may be useful to revisit why WC had to abandon the old forum software. For those who weren’t around during the transition, the short answer is that it wasn’t optional—it had to be done. The old software simply stopped working, and there is no modern forum software that supports the old-style “threaded” message format. It was written in Perl, a scripting language that is now rarely used, and I was unable to find anyone willing or able to maintain or update it. Programmers invest their time in learning skills that are marketable, and Perl no longer is.

I looked into using the same software platforms used by sites like Sawmill Creek, LumberJocks, and other popular woodworking forums. These are proprietary systems, offered either as self-hosted packages or as Software as a Service (SaaS), where the vendor hosts everything and you pay a subscription fee. Both options are expensive, with SaaS costs running into the hundreds of dollars per month for a site with a database of over a million posts. The real deal-breaker, however, was data migration. None of these vendors could convert our existing database, which meant abandoning more than 25 years of content and starting from scratch.

The one exception was the developer of FluxBB, who was in the process of completely rewriting it as ForkBB using modern languages, databases, and security practices. I asked whether he would be willing to help migrate our hundreds of thousands of posts from the obsolete system into his new software, which would also serve as a large-scale real-world test of how it handled millions of messages. After I described the database structure, his response was essentially, “Sure—send me some real examples and I’ll figure it out.”

It worked—mostly—but it required many cycles of tweaking and fixing issues that only show up when converting data at that scale. That’s normal, and it’s exactly why this kind of work is so expensive. It’s time-consuming and requires a very high level of expertise. In this case, the developer did all of this completely pro bono.

To add another wrinkle, he’s Russian, and neither of us is fluent in the other’s native language. That made things interesting, though not nearly as difficult as you might expect. Modern translation tools are remarkably good, and language was far less of a challenge than the actual coding.

"And that's the rest of the story," as Paul Harvey used to say.

Wow, that sound like a lot of work.  Thanks for the results.