Listing your Dance Event or Service

The Dance Gypsy listing service is now mostly automated — faster easier and more reliable.

We aim to list as many traditional and folk dance events and services as possible — including regularly-scheduled or ongoing dances, special events such a festivals and dance camps, performers (callers, leaders, musicians, bands), organization and other dance related services. These listings are absolutely free and available to all dancers and organizations! And it is the Dance Gypsy‘s philosophy that they should remain so forever. (We do accept paid advertisements which provide even better exposure — but the basic dance listing are free, whether you advertise or not.) All listings in the Dance Gypsy are spam-protected.

A new way to list

Any dance organizer, musician, leader or caller can add or update listings to the Dance Gypsy. No longer do you need to send emails to the Dance Gypsy and then sit and wait to see if we get the email and update your dance correctly. Simply log into the Dance Gypsy User–Update Pages and insert or update your information. Currently you can update information for

• Musicians
• Dance leaders
• Bands
• Festivals and special events
• Regularly–occurring dances (e.g., weekly or monthly)
• Venues
• Organizations (coming soon)

This is faster for a very simple reason: The Dance Gypsy receives hundreds of emails each week related to listings. The backlog can be anywhere from a week to a month. Unfortunately, every month we simply throw away some number of requests because they were received late and we were unable to process them before the date of the event. This problem is completely avoided when updating your own data.

It is more accurate: Every month we receive several emails which say in effect “we (the Dance Gypsy) made a mistake in the listing, please correct it” . When you update it yourself, you can immediately see how your listing will appear on the website (we even provide a link to take you directly to it. If it isn't right or you want to improve it, just make the changes and view it again. Remember also that errors will often be obvious to you, while virtually invisible to us. For example, if your own phone number is displayed correctly, you will notice that immediate, or you may see the price and think “our dance hasn't been $3 in years!” We are not likely to notice small errors like that within an extensive and otherwise correct listing.

More complete: the automated listing service provides new or extra options (not usually available for traditional (emailed) updates)

• Spell checking: performer names at your event are found and identified even if you spell them differently than the spelling we use (alternatively you can view this as alerting you to places where the Dance Gypsy has misspelled your information) and you can override our spelling.
• Bulk additions: copy your list of performers from any electronic source.
• Event descriptions: freeform description of your event
• Annual update — a single button to update your event for a new year
• Pictures: performers and bands can include a picture in their listing
• Music: performers and bands can include a sample of their music with their listing
• Venue finding: we probably know the address of yore venue, this is automatically inserted in your listing.
• Social networking: Facebook, Twitter, etc (coming soon)
• more

How to update your own data

Log in to the user pages: Many of you already have user accounts.

www.thedancegypsy.com > user > login

Select the type of information to update (individual performer, band, festival/special event or dance series).

Find your information (if we already have information about it) or create totally new information (if we don’t): you may insert/ change or update virtually every item that can appear in the Dance Gypsy.

Help: each page has extensive help file (marked with a question mark) to help you.

The old way: email?

Yes, we will continue to update information from emails that you send us. Yes, the self-serve option is by far the faster and more accurate.(see suggestions). But we understand that there are many reasons why it may not be practical for a particular event or person. So you may send us requests for us to update. But please have patience. they sometimes do not happen right away.

Time Comparisons: Roughly you can estimate the time for an update as:

• Direct User Update : within seconds
• Email: 1-2 weeks
• Snail mail: a month or longer
• Email saying only "please see our website”: a month or longer

Things we list:

• Events involving all participatory folk and traditional dance forms (including but not restricted to: folk dance, contra dances, international, English country, Scottish country, Balkan and other dance forms)
• Events exclusively or partially devoted to dance: dances, festivals, camps, vacations:
  • We attempt to list all dances — but we repy on our wide network of user-updaters to provide most of the information.
• People who perform at dances: musicians, callers, leaders, instructors.
• Bands who play for dances.
• Venues where dances are held
• Organizations that promote or sponsor traditional dance (currently down)

Things we normally do not list:

Although many other people and things are dance-related and important to many members of the dance community, we just can't list everything. In general the key words are “participatory” and “traditional”. Thus we do not normally list:

• Non-participatory dances such as a dance concert.
• Dances not open to our intended audience: “Dance Gypsies.” This might preclude dances:
  • which require subscribing to an entire dance series
  • a short term lesson series for which participants are expected to attend all sessions.
  • with admission as couples only
  • with harsh dress codes (e.g. coat and tie required)
  • with extremely high admission fees (e.g. $100/person for an evening)
• Events which although of interest to the dance community (e.g., fiddle or traditional instrument concert) include no actual participatory dancing.
• Dances of a non-traditional nature such as rock or contact improv.
• Musicians and bands who do not play for dances or who do not play for traditional dances.

Event listings:

We maintain two primary lists of dance events — each with its own philosophy

1. Regular/monthly Dances includes regularly-scheduled or ongoing (e.g., weekly, monthly) events. Events in this list normally occur once or more each (or most) month. These events are normally one evening in length. Basic information such as time price and location usually stays the same from month to month. But selected items such as caller, instructor or band may change each week or month. These events can be looked up by date, state, dance style, or week of the month. They are also cross indexed in the performer sections.
2. Festivals/special events: Events such as festivals, dance camps, holiday dances, all night dances, etc. Generally this means events that occur either annually or as a one-shot event.

Performer Listings

We will list any caller, instructor, leader, musician or band that plays for dances. Normally we attempt to find out basic information for any person or group that appears at dances listed in either of the dance listing sections, but we are happy to list performers even of they do not appear at events covered in the Dance Gypsy (assuming they do appear at similar events).

What information we need:

For events, we need at least the basic information:

• Venue (building name such as Grange or Town Hall and address)
• Town and state (often we will already have this)
• Dance type (e.g., contra, Cajun)
• Date and time
• Contact information (name, phone number and/or Email address, web sites)
• Plus the following make for a better more informative listing:
  • Performers (caller, band, instructor, or  ...) (please indicate when this is a standing house band or caller)
  • Regular price (note: this should be the price for an outsider showing up without an advanced ticket)
  • Special info (e.g.  pot luck beforehand)
  • Dance vacation (months when the series does not meet)
  • Addition special information such as the frequent admonition to “Please wear soft soled shoes.”
  • If you know the band members and believe the Dance Gypsy may not yet have them within our data base, feel free to provide them too (once in our data base, they are automatically added to dances whenever they play)
• We will also list notices of canceled or rescheduled events.

Note: Yes, we can theoretically get your information off your web page (if we know it) — in fact we try to do so a couple times every year. But searching the roughly 1000 bed sites we index is a very time consuming task, that once or twice annually is about all we have time for. If you do not provide the data, and our visit to your site happens to be the day before you perform your own update it could be six months or a year before we discover it. Bottom line: it is much much easier for us if you can update your own data— and that means we will be able to provide information on even more events. We thank you in advance for your help. If everyone says to me: “just get it off the web site,” we will never be able to finish the job. It really does require the co-operation off everyone. Once your listing is established, monthly updates are normally straight forward involving only an item or two.

How to submit your data:

You may submit the information by whatever means you wish, but the Gypsy‘s strong preferences is the automated service. And we predict it will rapidly become your preference too. This is much faster, more reliable, more accurate and more complete. Most of our time now is devoted to constructing and improving the tools enabling the direct user-update. Time improving that capability will impact many events in the future. Our time is much better building those tools than making a single update (the old “teach a man to fish” story). Generally, we will only provide basic listing information for events submitted by email or snail mail. (see suggestions).

Other possibilities (see contact information) include:

• phone
• snail mail
• fax
• (hand me a flyer at a dance)

Contact us now:

When we need it:

• Events are now listed approximately one year in advance. There are no absolute deadlines as such. When we have your information it can be added to the data base. The sooner you provide the information, the sooner it is listed. We now attempt to list all events no matter when they are submitted — but time is a limited commodity. When it is tight, I try to use it in the most productive manner. For example, I may skip an event that occurs tomorrow if I am too busy. An event received three months in the future will certainly get listed well before the event.
• Automated submissions are updated immediately (literally, you can see the results as you as you enter them)
• You may enter (or send) information for your festival or special event at any time — the earlier the better. We can list your event as much as a year before its date.

For reference: a typical listing in the calendar looks something like:

A typical entry in the Festival Planner looks like:

Once I have your dance in my data base, I will send you a monthly request via Email for information for the following month. You need only provide the changes or special information each month. If we don‘t have your Email address, please send it to us. (If you think we have it but you don‘t get a reminder, that probably means we don‘t really have it.)

Spam protection

We all hate spam, but musicians, bands callers and dance organizers do need to keep their Email addresses public. This means that spammers can and do harvest their Email addresses from Email lists, corporate transactions — and, yes, from web pages.

The Dance Gypsy uses an internal representation that protects the many listings contained within these pages from spammers. For human reader, these are in visible. All Email addresses are visible without having to translate them in your head (e.g., changing “at” to “@”, deleting the “nospam”, etc.). All addresses are dynamic links that cause your Email program to start a message to the performer or dance they are interested in (without having to go through a series of extra links). But they are invisible to almost any spam harvesting program!

How this protection is provided: All addresses are “munged,” that is they are altered so that their form differs from that expected by harvesting programs. Harvesting programs expect to find keywords such as the “@”, which human users can see, and special internal or invisible words such as “mailto” and “href”. The Dance Gypsy‘s web pages do not use these special symbols. If you wish to see the distinction, find a real Email address on this page and a similar reference within some other web page at another site. Select “view frame source” from your browser‘s menus. You should be able to find text within all the arcane words that resembles the address in question, but you will not find the address in the Dance Gypsy‘s pages.