The Dance Gypsy

News

For purposes of listing, the news has been broken into three sections:

New Features in the Dance Gypsy

 

November 2002

Oops — generic listings lost: Due to a software glitch, the "confirmed listings" data for November has become unavailable. December (and hopefully all future) data is correct. The Dance Gypsy apologizes for any inconvenience.

Dance Gypsy Fund Drive a success: The Dance Gypsy’s first semi-annual fund drive is now over. And you will be spared the obnoxious pop up ads for the the next 6 months. Such pop ups will be reserved for items of special interest for the dance community.

For a first time fund drive, this was a modest success bringing in almost enough funds to pay the presently-known operating costs coming due between now and the end of 2002. More importantly, it assures that the Dance Gypsy will continue to deliver the information dancers need. To all the users who helped during the fund drive, a very heart-felt “thank you.” Be sure to thank those wonderful people when you see them at a dance. You may see a list of who they are on the Supporters page. And of course you can still contribute at any time via the Support page.

Record visitors to the Dance Gypsy: Even more important than the number of contributors in the month of October, was the number of visitors: Today with two days to go in the month, we passed the 6000 visitor mark, easily making October the record visitor month. On October 25 we had 329 visitors — also a Dance Gypsy record. [For those of you who prefer the classic ‘hit count’ to the visitor count, that’s 53,000 hits so far in October, and 3130 hits on a single day.] As seen in the chart below, this simply marks a point in a long but steady increase:

Visitors
per
month

600›
 


‹ 6000
 month: 3
01 		    6
01 		  8
01 		  10
01 		  12
01 		1
02 		  3
02 		    6
02 		  8
02 		  10
02

This is more than a 10-fold increase in a year and a half since the Dance Gypsy first set up its web pages at its current site in March of last year. We hope it truly means that the electronic Dance Gypsy is proving to be the useful tool that we had hoped it would be for dancers around the country.

October 2002

Cross referenced listings: The "generic listings" of dances (by state, dance type or week of the month) now include a listings of the confirmed dances for the next two months. So you can look up your favorite dance type and see who is featured in the next couple of months. In addition listings for callers, instructors, bands and musicians list their upcoming gigs (alas at the moment such listings only include musicians playing by themselves or with a named group).

Future dances: The daily listings now extend further into the future -- although at the moment dances are never marked "confirmed" more than two months ahead.

Warnings: The dance listings now carry warnings for holidays and other dates when dance cancellations are more likely.

 

September 2002

Dance News: Not the least of the new features is (this) link. When we receive special or unusual news about the dance world, we will place it here on this page. In this first installment, the news is mostly about changes in the Dance Gypsy. But in general this page will be used for important updates -- everything from the announcement of major awards to cancellations of major events. It will not be used for press releases for the various dances and festivals. If people want that service, perhaps some day we can add it.

Boston & Rhode Island: After all these years, the Dance Gypsy will finally cover dances in the Boston metropolitan area, Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut. The new listings are merged in with those we have traditionally covered right in the regular dance section. This means that the Dance Gypsy has approximately 50 more dance listings each month and is now truly "all New England."

Dance Venue Web Sites: In the very near future, the Dance Gypsy will make personalized websites available to dances in New England. This service will be ideal for many smaller dance venues which cannot afford the cost of a big fancy commercial site. Alas there will be a small fee, but it will be far lower than you could obtain through a commercial web-builder or Internet service provider. Watch the Dance Gypsy for announcements of this new service.

Advertising: When the dance Gypsy went paperless, we pretty much stopped most advertising. Now the Dance Gypsy is again ready to accept ads for your dance related event or service. For the remainder of this year, our introductory rates start as low as $10 for 3 months or $20 for a year. See the advertising pages.

Fund drive: Later this month the Dance Gypsy will run its first semiannual fund drive. Fortunately, it will be short and unobtrusive: Running on an NPR-style: pay what you think it is worth, you will see one extra splash window appearing when you first log in for a period of two weeks... then no more for 6 months. See a preview of the funding drive.

Late Breaking changes

The Brookline (MA) Norwegian dance has moved to Arlington. The schedule also changed from second to fourth Fridays. There is a dance on November 23rd but not the 9th. The next dance after that will be in January.

General Dance News