Administrivia

Feel free to link any of my pages to your pages. In particular, feel free to provide links to band tour schedules, descriptions, and directions, as well as to anything else in these pages. All I ask in return is that you help other people to get on the net and on the Web, preferably with modern tools (a process well described by Adam Engst in his books The Internet Starter Kit...), and that you send info about your dances and dance-related pages so that I can include them here. Send email if you have questions.

To submit listings

Submit listings via email in the form you see them on the main listing page, namely with the name of the city and state, the name of the sponsoring group, the days dances are held (please spell numbers and days, to aid humans in pattern recognition) and the names and streets (but not street numbers) of sites. If your group sponsors special dances, please mention those as well, and provide separate info. Send dance times and site addresses with directions if you have them, and contact info as well, IF and only if you can confirm that the contacts actually want to be listed in THIS guide. In particular, please confirm that it's okay to provide other people's email addresses for mailto: URLs before offering them.

To submit listings on paper, send them to me at

Kiran Wagle 1628 5th St NW Washington, DC 20001

Feel free to sign me up for any mailing lists you like; I love junk mail.

To submit schedules

Submit contra and contra-related square (not English) schedules as ASCII text in the form

mon date day at name of site 
caller calls with band who are names of musicians

or, if you know HTML or want to try anyway, in the form

<DT><B>mon date</B> day at name of site<BR>
<DD><B>caller</B> calls with <B><I>band</I></B> who are <BR><B>names</B>
<HR><address>Last updated on February 1, 1995 by <a href="mailto:user@node.domain">
user@node.domain (Your Name)</a></address>

Include directions to sites as separate pieces of text, and if you include contact information that isn't for YOU, please confirm that the people listed actually do want to be called. I don't want to contribute to the flow of junk mail the net has been producing in recent months. Also, please spell months and days in their entirety, and don't use cryptic three-letter acronyms to refer to dance sites. This is hypertext, eventually each site name will be a link to directions to that site.

Go to the contradance home page, the list of local dances, the list of dance weekends, or the list of callers, musicians,and bands.

Last updated on February 1, 1995 by entropy@io.com (Kiran Wagle)

Things to do

To do list as of 12/30/95: Alternate text for browsers which can't display images/ has been added. A first draft of a schedule format has been done and decided upon. A page of sources has been added, revealing a problem in deciding how to link bands to recording reviews to sources. Many more band pages are needed, as are biographies. Navigation aids have been added to the existing leaf pages.

To do list as of 12/28/94: I've decided to store schedules locally, in a standard HTML format (the design of which is a tough problem!) so that I can link the schedules to the band and caller info.) The local area and dance weekend lists will NOT be broken apart, they'll continue to live in one large file. Directory structure revisions have been done, probably breaking all the links, but vastly simplifying maintenance. Future projects include rewriting the three main headings (local dances, bands, and weekends) into a paragraph of introductory text with links (hypertext done right!) soliciting articles on subjects on which there may be consensus, such as calling and sound systems, aand biographical information on bands and callers, preparing a list of Frequently Asked Questions, and creating a directory of dancers' email/snailmail addresses with a searchable index if there's any demand for one. Important security issues need to be addressed, though, as I do NOT want random net-surfers accessing the directory, nor do I want to provide inadvertent help to spammers. I'd like to get permission for mailto: URLs for providers of information, in any case. Oh, and correcting the window titles to some standard format.

To do list as of 12/24/94:: Specific tasks immediately pending include typing in much data I have scattered around on paper, finding or writing text descriptions of contradancing and some simple dance moves, inserting a blurb and address for the folk dance mailing list, finding more city and state information pages and choosing good ones, creating named anchors for each area in the local list and linking those to a list of dance weekends and a "form" on the main dance page, to provide quick access to the info.

Breaking the city info apart will become necessary as it grows in size. Also needed are local maintainers of dance schedules and directions to be linked to this page via ftp or http, and a comprehensive collection of local contact telephone nubers, email and snailmail addresses, contact information for bands and callers, band tour dates and information, directions and maps to the various sites, and links to tie the whole thing together.

Future projects include developing a standard design for dance schedules in HTML, imagemaps, photographs (if anyone wants to provide them with releases from the people in them), a catalogue of recordings by contradance bands as well as other recordings of interest to dancers, and a collection of my favorite dances. A catalogue of publications and an archive of the best of rec.folk-dancing, a neat logo and an index to the whole thing would be nice too. And then there's the 24/7 SLIP connection and MacHTTP....

GO to the contradance home page, the article index, the list of books, the index of dance sequences, the dance gypsy travel planner, the list of local Web pages, the list of dance weekends, the list of bands, musicians, and callers, the page of random pages, or the top of this page.