"Mostly Dance" Events Calendar FAQ

What is this FAQ page for?

This page explains a little about the Willamette Valley Mostly Dancing Events Calendar.

What is the Willamette Valley Mostly Dancing Events Calendar?

It's an online Web-based calendar of the local dance events I know about. Check it out here.

Why do you provide the events calendar?

I want to help people keep aware of dancing opportunities in their communities and around the Willamette Valley. I think dancing is more fun when lots of people are doing it; this is my way of encouraging people to get and stay involved.

Where do you get the information?

Mostly from the sources listed on my Links page. The Eugene Weekly, in particular, is invaluable in keeping up with what's happening in Eugene.

I'd also like to acknowledge the invaluable information and help I get from specific contributors like Tim Anderson (via his TWS list in Portland), Trina Siebert, Dave Feinberg, and Grace Poisel. Without these folks, my page would be even more incomplete and out of date than it is now. If you have information that should be listed, let me know!

Hey! I went to an event listed on your page and it wasn't happening!

Sorry! I don't have the time to re-verify all this information every week or month. When I find out about inaccuracies, I correct them, so let me know if I've led you astray or if you see information listed that you know is in error.

Why do you sometimes fail to update the calendar for months on end?

I get busy with other things, mostly. I work full time and take classes at UO, plus dance whenever I can. This page is an expression of my enthusiasm for dancing and my wish for you to come dancing, but not a job or a relationship or some other kind of serious commitment. Maintaining it is not as much fun as dancing. I work on it when I feel I have time.

If you find I've been neglecting the calendar, check out the Links page. Links there will lead you to many of the information sources I use in compiling the calendar, and you can see for yourself what events are scheduled.

I mostly like (some specific kind of dancing). Why do you have all those other kinds listed too?

I like lots of different kinds of dancing. Everything I'm interested in, I put on the page. I even list some things I'm not personally very interested in, if I think that my friends might be.

The page is garish and ugly as sin. Why is that?

Yes, it's atrocious, isn't it?

It doesn't have pretty graphics and artistic page layout because I'm not interested enough in those things to want to put any time into them. I also want the page to load fast, even for people with slow computers and modems, or PalmPilots hooked to cell phones.

It has the garish ugly colors because I wanted a simple and easy way for people to tell what city the events are in, and color coding seemed to be the clearest way to express that information. Some people don't want to drive long distances to dance, so this helps them quickly identify the events that they are interested in. I guess I could pick prettier colors, but the green and orange theme just seemed to be suggested by the colors of the universities in Eugene and Corvallis. I couldn't make Portland blue, because then the hyperlinks wouldn't show up very well.

If people don't like to drive for dancing, why not just have a list for (my city)? Or why not have different lists?

I lived in Corvallis for years. We thought nothing of driving to Eugene or Portland for a good dancing event. For much of summer 2001, I went dancing twice a week at the Viscount in Portland. From 1997 to 2001, I only rarely missed a Swing Sunday at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland. We just wanted to know where the good dancing was. That's still pretty much my attitude.

I didn't want to have different lists because I didn't want to maintain different lists, or have to consult different lists to get an overview of what is happpening. This means you need to use the color codes to determine which events you consider to be "in range".

Color Codes? What Color Codes?

Cascading Style Sheets have been the recommended way to apply visual styles to Web pages since 1999. I use them to tweak the way the page looks in your browser, including the color coding. Many older browsers don't support CSS, or don't support it very well. Netscape Navigator 4.x is a good example. Netscape 6.2 or later has very good CSS support. Internet Explorer 5.x has some CSS support and IE 6.x has pretty good CSS support. The calendar should open fine and display okay in older browsers; you just won't see the CSS-based tweaks like color coding. For the most part, I'm still also putting the city in the text of each event item.

But you could use "FONT COLOR=" tags . . .

Yuck. Too much of a pain. Too much bulk and ugliness added to the code. FONT tags are deprecated HTML elements now; CSS is much more elegant. Get yourself a newer browser and see what you've been missing.

What kind of database engine is behind this site?

This site is made by hand; it's not dynamic.

I haven't been happy with the results of similar kinds of sites I've seen that are dynamically-generated using a database engine. I'm probably going to play with MySQL and PHP to see what I can come up with, but for now, I'm doing it by hand.

That's a scary amount of typing, dude.

You're telling me! When I keep up with this thing, there is a pretty substantial number of entries every week. Even trying to maximize the reuse of old entries, I end up typing more than I would like.

I look forward to the day when computers make it possible to further automate this process. Wouldn't it be cool to select a calendar entry and "Save to my Palm computer"? It would be cool if the weekly, monthly, and "every first and third Friday" type events would generate themselves, rather than me copying and pasting.

I have some hope, what with Apple's new Mac OS X "iCal" application, and a somewhat similar free program from the Mozilla group that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, that both use an Internet-standard calendaring format. Hopefully, soon computers will be able to easily exchange meaningful information about events. In the interim, I will keep typing information here in hopes that you will come out dancing.

How do I print this? It's a pretty long list!

Hard copy is the devil's work! Oh, okay. Sometimes it's useful to have "information to go". What I do, is copy the part I want and paste it into a word processor. There I can edit out the parts I don't need and print just what I want, in whatever size font I want.