Dance Web

… a little late coming (and not just because thanks gets people in trouble….), but I wanted to recognize Shadiyah’s efforts to populate the dance calendar. She’s put a lot of time into making that a useful and up-to-date feature here. So, thanks.

a step-by-step walkthrough on how to add material to the community dance calendar hosted on this site:

1) If you don’t already have one, get an account with Google.

1a) Go to www.google.com

1b) Click on “sign in”

1c) Click on “create account now”

1d) Fill in the form

2) Tell me the email address you used to create the account, send it to danceblog|(a)|rojisan.com, and let me know that you’d like your events added to the community calendar.

3) Log in with your Google account, go to https://www.google.com/accounts/Login

4) Go to http://www.google.com/calendar/

5) Click on “Add Event”

6) Fill in the information for your event, make your event “Public,” and invite “Dance Blog” as a guest to your event.

That’s it. What you do with your own calendar is up to you, but your events should now show up on this calendar.

If you’ve already got events on your Google calendar, and you haven’t added “Dance Blog” as a guest, you can go back and do that anytime.  If I’ve approved you for posting to the community calendar, they’ll automagically show up here as soon as you do.

after doing some tests overnight, the new google-based calendar is now available.

this allows some great features, including good support for recurring events, but the trick is that you will need an account with google (gmail will do) in order to publish your events. once you have one, you need to get in touch with me so i can give you permission to add things to the community calendar. after that, just invite the “dance blog” to any event you add to your own calendar and those events should automagically show up here.

another advantage to this approach is that you can use your own google-calendar on your own site, and you get to decide which events are published there (and here).

so, jump in, the water’s fine…

if you can read this, you probably noticed there’s a major transition underway here at the dance web…

as part of my overall short-term need to simplify and consolidate a number of things, i’ve concluded that drupal, while a great platform to work with (on some levels, anyway…) is entirely too much to manage for the way the dance web gets used around here. so, we’re back to a basic blog format. so, this is much, much simpler (on me, anyway).

there were several other people that did actively participate in the dance web, and i don’t want to make this an exclusive “roj-only” space. so, if you’d like to contribute your thoughts and writing here (and i know and trust you… :) ), just send me a message and i’ll get you set up. really, you’re very much invited.

in the meantime, the calendar will vanish temporarily (hopefully back soon, better than ever), and we’re losing the aggregator, polls and a few other features.

finally, i’m going to pick a generic wordpress theme for now, but i also want to invite any theme-builders to strut there stuff here. i just know i won’t get around to it anytime soon, so if you’ve got a great idea for a great look for the dance web, lay it on me…

Stop by http://www.inthedancersstudio.com/ and say hi…

yahoo seems to think so….

ask yahoo yourself

With the end of 2005, I’ve had a chance to spend some time looking at how this site is used, and, sadly, my general impression is validated with that data… Warning: After the past few months, I’m pretty down on the whole belly dancing thing, and that’s going to come through in this message. My apologies in advance. Let me cut right to the chase:

Over 400 people are registered and have access to post material here on this site - but no one is.

There are a few visitors that consistently visit and consistently post their information, and I am thankful for their participation. That said, any concept of a “community” I had hoped would evolve with this space has failed to materialize. Now, I have to focus on this site and its future.

The last “forum post” of any kind was almost two months ago. The last comment posted here was more than 10 weeks ago. While I can provide what appears to be excellent coverage with search engines for material you put here, it’s almost entirely material *I* put here. I don’t need another space to spew my own thoughts (I’ve already got one of those and no time to write there). On the positive side, even this dark little corner of the web has attracted over 45,000 visits just through search engines from people around the world looking for dance-related content (and, surprisingly, a large number from France, Germany, Australia and Malaysia). Those people should be finding your material, but so far, your material isn’t here to be found.

So, good search engine magic isn’t enough to attract significant participation here, and despite my own [admittedly sporadic] efforts to stir up some commentary with dance-related items from the media, this site doesn’t seem to work for you. There are plenty of discussion sites out there (bhuz, orientaldancer.net, tribe.net, yahoo and so many more (many of which are available here too). Discussion stuff was always pretty speculative for this place, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to try something with a more local focus.

The original purpose here was the calendar, and even there, only a few people are posting their events. I know it’s not the prettiest thing, but it was intended to serve a very particular purpose that is still, I think, unmet: A [mostly] regional calendar with a full array of up-to-date events and happenings from a good number of the performers in the area. Straddling the boundary between the dozens of individual calendars on each of your personal sites and the limited updates of the WAMEDA and Baltimore Bellydance calendars. My hope was that by allowing the people responsible for organizing events to promote their events with a simple fill-in-the-blank form, rather than waiting for me to get around to posting their material it would be a) more useful and b) more accurate. The bigger idea was to help you find your audience.

I had plans to expand the calendar effort pretty significantly, and add some neat features that would help you with your own web sites (giving you tools to pull your own events from this site into your site so you only have to update one place), but there seems to be little point in making that effort given the level of participation.

This all leaves me with one last general appeal to the public, to follow this one, which has had no response. This time, I’m going to be a little more stark and blunt:

Is there any point in running this site? If so, what do you want from it?

I hate arbitrary deadlines as much as the next person, but in the interest of not wasting any more of my time, let’s say we figure this out by the end of January, or I’ll just pull the plug on the whole thing and move on to something else. Maybe it was just a bad idea; I’m ok with that.

so, it’s time to consider how this site is used, and how best to direct its future… so i have a few questions, and i hope some of you will forward your thoughts, either in public comments or via some backshannel….

1) is anyone still using the aggregator? i haven’t seen any requests for new feeds lately…

2) i’ve got a forum on here set up to review various things, but very little in the way of reviews - anyone care? http://www.rojisan.com/dance/forum/45

3) one of the main reasons this site exists is the calendar - what can i do to make it more useful and used?

thanks

Drop by the new calendar and let me know what you think…

…and don’t forget to get your upcoming events in here!

As part of this transition, you’ll notice that the “past events” are gone - there weren’t any comments attached, and while I generally don’t like breaking things that people may have linked to, I figured better to go ahead and do that now while the site is relatively small.

Just a few things, quickly…..

You’ll find a new “feedback” link on the left. That will let you get in touch with me just by filling out a form.

The set of “links” is now optional - you can turn that off by visiting “my account” from the main menu.

I’ve also added a little item to allow you to change the font size on the site, if you find it difficult to read, just click on the bigger “A.” That item is also optional, if you’d like to clean up the screen just a little.

And while you’re on the “my account” page, you may notice that several fields are now “public” - you can opt to share your general location (state/country) and contact information (aim/icq/yahoo/etc), as well as a bio and “interests.” I’ve also added a space for the bellydancer color link-code to the “professional information” profile. All of this stuff is completely optional, but in the interest of community you can share if you’d like to.

If you use “proper” format for links and email addresses in material posted here, it should automatically turn into links now.

There’s also a monthly-calendar view for events available.

And finally, the “cryptic” links here should be a little more understandable, now in a date-title format across the site, Unfortunately, this means that some inbound links to the site will get broken, so my apologies in advance - sorry!

As always, new features means I may have broken something, so if you run into trouble, please let me know.