shoemaking.wiki is the digital shoemaking notebook of Kyle E. Mitchell (kyle@kemitchell.com), a lawyer, computer programmer, and hobby bootmaker based in Oakland, California. I’m happy to share it with everyone online, in the hopes it will help other shoemakers, as so many shoemakers have helped me.
Wiki
shoemaking.wiki is not yet a “wiki” in the truest sense. There’s no way to sign up for an account and edit entries yourself, directly. However, a great deal of information comes from others who take the time to send e-mails and meet me in person at events. Then I update the entries myself.
Links
The most useful thing to know about the wiki’s structure is how it handles links between entries. At the bottom of most entries, you’ll find an “Entries Linking Here” section with a list of links to other entries. Each of those linked entries mentions the subject of the first and links to it. The lists are created automatically, not updated by hand. This makes it quick and simple for me, as editor, to index videos, books, and other resources that cover a certain process, style, tool, material, or technique.
Some entries work more like indexes or categories, where the “Entries Linking Here” is really the crux of their content. The books entry, for example, lists all the books with entries on the site. The countries entry lists a bunch of country entries, which in turn list makers, suppliers, schools, and other entries relevant to the place.
A few entries are also lists of links, but arranged in some useful way. The process timeline, for example, lists out a step-by-step breakdown of the whole shoemaking process, with links to an entry on each sub-process.