Page 5 of 5

Re: The Official OSG Coffee Table Book Thread!

Posted: Fri Jan 16, 2015 12:29 pm
by aai
arkivel wrote:Great idea but it sounds really ambitious. How could you possibly fit all the information on this website into just one book? It may also be too broad for a coffee table book.

I'd split it up into two projects:

1. The Offset Guitar wiki.

a. Online resource comprising all known technical details related to Fender offsets.

2. The Fender Offset Guitar Book.

a. A History of offset guitar with write ups, pictures of prototypes, photos of early players.
b. A basic description of each guitar model by year or era.
c. An illustrated overview that explains how the offset vibrato unit and various wiring schemes function.
d. An essay on the "dark years" of offset guitars and their rebirth.
e. A feature on modern offsets including non-fender guitars
f. A section devoted to interesting or popular modifications for these guitars with some information on basic set-up.
h. A link to or bonus CD/digital medium of "the Offset Guitar wiki"
I agree with this project. Instead of people submitting photos to this thread, we should divide power amongst the tech-savvy folks. Right now, I think the most useful thing would be for people to use this thread as an "offset history" link dump, because I think finding qualified research will be the hardest part. Another bummer is that my favorite offset historians don't seem to frequent the board any longer.

For the pictures, we'd just need a shared filehosting site with a README including the stipulations for quality: I bought my DSLR on the FS section, so I (maybe erroneously) assume a lot of guitar nerds are also photo nerds, and for people that don't have access to photo equipment, they would hopefully know someone with a penchant for photography. I know very little about photo editing, but I know in film that tasteful color correction can give disparate shooting locations cohesion in the entirety of a body of work.

Github has free hosting and I'd be willing to try to hack together a wiki, but it might be unfair to other offset history content creators, because a good deal of what would populate it would ride off of their aggregation of offset miscellanea. I think that before you could make a book, you'd have to make an awesome wiki, because the type of professionalism and collaboration to make a book would be considerably more than the wiki. The wiki could provide motivation for the physical copy, or it'd fizzle out and become a half-completed resource. In terms of a "wiki" project, any webdevs have any suggestions for frameworks for me? Or should I try to do it with the tools I know, like Django or Flask?

On that note, I've always wanted to communicate with the moderators and site creators and see what the guts of OSG looked like.