Hi, Luke

I surf the web regularly for new-to-me choreography.  When I do, I almost always am looking up the collection of a choreographer I just heard of, met, or whose choreography I just encountered at an event.  In this case, I look through the whole collection and pick out the ones that fit my repertoire.  As such, it is not typically important to me to see categories, though perhaps a published date might be helpful if I am returning to your collection after having gone through it in the past.

However, when I was a new caller, it seemed so hard to collect dances with particular figures, transitions, orientations, or whatever, so those kinds of categories would have been more useful to me years ago and thus may be useful to many others now.

Hope this info is helpful!

Dugan Murphy
Portland, Maine
dugan at duganmurphy.com
www.DuganMurphy.com
www.PortlandIntownContraDance.com
www.NufSed.consulting


 
From: Luke Donforth <luke.donev@gmail.com>
Subject: [Callers] Publishing dances on the web

Hi Folks,

I currently have a terrible system for publishing dances I've written on
the web (blog-esque thing in wordpress; really hard to search through).
There's been talk on and off of a big database of dances, but that doesn't
seem to be happening so I thought I should do something for mine.

I'm contemplating better ways of making dances my compositions more
accessible; and since that would be for other people, I'm curious what's
useful for other people.

I'm envisioning four categories of dances; and then just lists of dances
(title & sequence) on those pages. The categories I had in mind:
Family dances
Glossary contras
Unique contras
Odd formations

Are there separate things you'd want to see in a list of dances when you're
going through? Beckets, Closing dances, bouncy/smooth, etc.

I've gotten really attached to Callers Companion (
http://callerscompanion.com/), and really like how it lets searches happen
on dances. Anyone have a good way to incorporate that, or the type of
element checklist/flag it provides, into a web-based interface for dances?

It might also be that most folks don't collect dances from websites; and
this is wasted time. But it does seem like I've obfuscated finding my
compositions, and I regret not making them more available.

Thoughts, opinions, experience, and advice appreciated.

Thanks!

--
Luke Donforth
Luke.Donforth@gmail.com