SC - saffron

[Stefan li Rous]

Olwen asked: 
> I throw in with the opinion of Mistress Christianna.  Thank you so much for 
> such a thourough and dedicated undertaking.  I would love to know the 
> beginnings story of the Florilegium..

Thank you, Olwen and everyone else for your support. My appologies for this
delayed reply. Yesterday I got caught up in Pennsic preperation stuff. Tonight
my modem seems to have died. #@$%^&!! I managed to get my new Powerbook (new
to me, anyway) set up for Internet connections. Nothing like a little
preasure to liven things up. sigh.

Anyway, to answer your question, back in 1988 or so, about the time I started
participating in the SCA I was running a BBS system. I started getting
the old fidonet Medieval echo and then the feed from the Rialto (which
had just switched to rec.org.sca and it was a one-way feed to the fidonet
at first). I first started saving and printing
out things I thought others in my local group might be able to use as
well as keeping them for my own referance. Little by little (yeah,
like a virus) I started saving more and more stuff that I thought others
might find useful. Of course some of this I later found I suddenly
had a wish for and was glad I'd saved it. I tried to build up an
interest by putting the files on my bbs and encouraging local folks
to come check the files out. Somewhere in 92 or so I started posting
some notices on the Rialto and a few mailing lists such as the
Ansteorra one about having some files that might be of interest and 
that folks should contact me so I could send any of it by email. I was 
also distributing paper copies of the filelist and any files requested 
locally. I think the entire filelist was only two or three pages then.

Somewhere in 1993, I think, Greg Lindahl (now Master Gregory Blount in
the SCA) saw one of my filelists and asked me if I would be interested
in having the files posted on his website. We worked out a procedure
where I updated a master catalog file and uploaded an RTF format of
the updated files to him, usually about twice a month. He had a program
that then converted the RTF file to the text and HTML versions. I have
to admitt the resulting HTML file was ugly but it worked.

Somewhere after this was when I started a monthly article describing
what was new in the Florilegium. For several years just for my local
newsletter. Now for a number of newsletters around the Known World.
I also now post it to various kingdom and other SCA mailing lists
as you have seen since I post it on this list. Recently I've started
creating an monthly article specifically for web publishing in addition
to the one for paper publication.

In early 99 or so it became apparent that Greg no longer had the time
needed to support the Florilegium as part of his site, so I set up
a temporary site in the web space that came with my texas.net account.
This let me quickly get new and updated files on line without a several
week delay waiting for Greg to find time to move the files around. The
idea was to then send a big batch of files to Greg every few months.
This wasn't working out, but I heartily thank Greg for hosting the
site for those many years during it's initial growth. For part of
the time I didn't even have web access to see my own files.

However, my personal site had a maximum of 50 Mbytes of space. So
I started looking for another site. There had been some thought that
I might be able to use the Ansteorra server that plans were then 
being made to purchase. But I didn't have time to wait for this to
happen and I have concerns about being to enmeshed in the SCA
beaurucracy. So I went looking for other sites. The Florilegium has
too much traffic and is two large for most of the web host sites.
Even the "unlimited" sites have small print in the contracts that
could be used to expell the Florilegium. However, my computer
friend, and sometime SCA participant up in Dallas was willing to
host my site. We are still working on getting a good local search
engine going and some other nice additions. Why a local search
engine? My friend pays for the bandwidth used. Think of the 
bandwidth used by a search engine trying to download each and
every file in the site, maybe once a night?

When I finally get the rest of the files moved over, I will probably
start considering adding some advertising to the site. Very directed
stuff of interest to the SCA and re-enactment community. I haven't
figured out how to market or price this yet.

There are currently something over 1200 different files in the
Florilegium with each of these available in three formats.  All but 
about a hundred or two have now been updated, reformatted and moved 
to the new site. I had hoped to have the rest of them moved before 
Pennsic, but that's not going to happen.

I am currently adding between 12 and 18 new files and updating
about thirty to forty more per month.

Unfortunately, while back in the early 90s it was almost possible
to read all messages on the Rialto, and almost all SCA internet
traffic passed through there, since 1994 or so the number of SCA 
mail lists has rapidly proliferated. And much of the info that
was on the Rialto has moved to them. So, I'm afraid that I am
only collecting a mere trinkle of the useful information out
there now. Although it some areas, such as cooking, my coverage
is considerably better. :-) But as you all know, just keeping up
with this list can be a problem at times. What with people like
me posting long and off-topic messages and such.

This was probably longer and more technical than most of you
wished.

- -- 
Lord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
Mark S. Harris             Austin, Texas           stefan at texas.net
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****