Re: [WebContent] Calendars

On Oct 13, 2011, at 11:55 AM, Lisa Sieverts wrote: I know of three websites (perhaps someone else knows of others) that collect detailed dance calendar information from a wide variety of other sites, namely: * Charlie Seelig's site: http://www.contradancelinks.com/ Some of the links under "Schedules" point to existing state-wide compilations. Most of them (plus the "Festivals, Weekends, Camps, etc." link) point to pages generated from date somehow collected and compiled by Charlie. * The _Dance Gypsy_ Dance and Festival Finder http://www.thedancegypsy.com/eventList.php * Ted Crane's Dance Database http://tedcrane.com/DanceDB/ Pages returned by searches for dance series, individuals, or bands, sometimes include listings of specific events (with date, location, and staff) that are part of the designated series, or at which the designated individuals or bands are supposedly scheduled to perform. (Perhaps I'm just not using the right magic decoder ring, but I find Charlie Seelig's site and the _Dance Gypsy_ site easier to use than this one, and my impression is that they're more comprehensive and more accurate as well. In any case, Ted does seem to gather enough dynamic information--i.e., info about specific events and not just generalized series information--to make his site worthy of note for present purposes). I have no idea what combination of automated scripts and manual intervention any of these sites use to collect their information, but the sheer volume of updating involved suggests that they all use a fair amount of automation. (Perhaps some of the independent state-wide calendars referenced from Charlie Seelig's site are also generated with the aid of automated scripts.) I also don't know what practices maintainers of individual dance series websites should follow in order to make it easy for these calendar compilation sites to gather their calendar info, or to increase the likelihood that late-breaking changes will get into the compiled calendars. Perhaps others on this list can shed some light on these matters. While I'm writing, I'll also take a moment to introduce myself. I'm a contra and ("traditional") square dance caller living in the San Francisco Bay area. I currently don't have a personal web page, nor am I on the BACDS web committee, though I occasionally act as a gadfly with suggestions for the web committee, and sometimes aid with compilation of data for our quarterly print calendar (which Alan Winston or others then put into the calendar database used by www.bacds.org). --Jim