News from the SCD Community

Anselm Lingnau

I just fixed a bug in the database that in some cases – mostly solo artists and newly-added bands – prevented albums and recordings from being credited to the respective artists on their »Person« pages. Thanks to Heiko Schmidt and Eric Ferguson for bringing it to my attention (with some persistence).

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 22 May 2014 14:19

Anselm Lingnau

I'm currently working on the Strathspey Archive with a view to not only reinstating timely updates, but also improving the user experience with regards to threading etc. This is proving more time-consuming than I thought because I need to re-index all 65.000+ past Strathspey messages, and the early parts of the Archive are in a fairly terrible state when it comes to metadata.

In particular, many messages have the same message ID (which theoretically isn't supposed to happen at all), and rather a lot of messages either refer to one of those duplicates (which needs resolving by hand) or else have something weird in their »In-Reply-To« header (which could be resolved by hand but I don't have the time just now).

The very early parts of the Archive have moved from one machine to the next for a very long time and it seems that the archiving software of the early days had a few nasty bugs. I hope that when I'm finished with the problems within the first few thousand messages things will improve. (Right now I'm in the 1800s.)

The strategic importance of this work is that I'm trying to move full-text search into the Django implementation of the mailing list archive (and in this process can manage to get rid of the external Sphinx search engine), and that we'll also get archives for the other mailing lists hosted on the system, most notably dancedata-friends.

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 5 May 2014 11:38

Anselm Lingnau

Eric's cribs are now imported correctly (some were missed because of a change in the source data format, instead being made part of the preceding crib). On top of that we now distinguish between »checked by Eric himself« and »checked by somebody else too«.

This is in the aftermath of the dance-intensity debate as per this thread on the Strathspey list, which introduced »per-turn« dance intensity in addition to Eric's »per-dance« dance intensity.

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 1 May 2014 1:28

Anselm Lingnau

Version Q of Eric's SCD Cribs has now been imported into the database (thanks Eric!). I'll see what I can do about the EPUB and Kindle e-book versions but don't hold your breath.

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 24 April 2014 14:17

Anselm Lingnau

I just posted a rough to-do list for the database. As the list itself says, there are no guarantees that any of the items of the list will actually ever be tackled, nor should the position of items within the list be construed as any kind of priority ordering.

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 24 April 2014 14:15 (last edited on 24 April 2014 14:18)

Anselm Lingnau

The dances in the user-rated ranking list now display the usual dance type, set shape, and source information. This was a five-line hack that I just added, prompted by a query in the SCD teachers' Facebook group where somebody asked for the »top 20 Drewry dances«. It is now easy to find these according to the user ratings (or indeed the top 20 dances for any dance author) simply by putting the author's name into the »filter« box at the top right of the table. (Although to be sure this will also catch dances where the search term occurs in the title, like Tribute to John Drewry, so if any of these are popular enough you will need to exclude them yourself.)

For our more technical-minded readers, the reason why this hasn't been added before is that the rating system implementation is generic and supports ratings of any database object (not just dances). It can generate links to the detail pages for all of these objects but so far didn't include supplementary info. On the other hand, adding that info is important for dances (a) to enable tricks like the one mentioned above, and (b) because some dance names have been used more than once, and it would be inconvenient to have to check the details page to see which dance was actually meant. So a special case is warranted here.

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 23 April 2014 12:21

Roderick Johnston

I play accordion for RSCDS classes, SCD dances and ceilidhs. I can provide solo accordion and up to a full band depending on requirements. Although based in the Highlands of Scotland I travel the UK and the Continent for SCD workshops and dances. Contact on 01397 700595

Will be playing with my band for the Leicester RSCDS dance on 12 April and for the Meaudre Reel weekend SCD workshop 25th-28th April in Meaudre, (Grenoble. Fr)

· Posted by Roderick Johnston · 20 March 2014 13:05 (last edited on 20 March 2014 13:18)

Anselm Lingnau

just released an optical make-over for »crib sheets«, both on the »Cribs« tab of a dance list and in the corresponding PDF output. This should look a lot less ragged, and the weird issue with the descriptions of a crib showing up before a page break and the bar numbers after should also be fixed.

In the PDF output, it is now possible to select whether all items should be numbered, none, or whether just dances should be numbered and non-dance items, like »Interval«, not (in which case extras are numbered separately, as in »16, 17, E1, E2, 18«).

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 12 March 2014 17:45 (last edited on 13 March 2014 0:04)

Anselm Lingnau

fixed the state-saving issue for dance list detail pages (and others). This is the problem where one would enter something into the search box on the big dance lists overview screen, and the same search term would then be used to filter the list of dances on a dance list's detail page.

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 6 March 2014 19:27

Anselm Lingnau

added support for displaying dance lists from the database on foreign (non-Strathspey) web sites. By means of a very small JavaScript program, administrators of these sites can include »dynamic« dance lists to their sites, for social functions, workshops, and so on. All dances, publications, etc. are linked to their corresponding entries in the database, and there are convenience links to download a crib sheet or diagram sheet or to view videos for the dances on the list (or those that actually have videos, anyway).

I have written a more in-depth article about this, with more details and examples. Do check this out and let me know how you get on!

· Posted by Anselm Lingnau · 28 February 2014 1:13