tangophilia blog

This is the new stuff, I go dancing in – Peter Gabriel, Sledgehammer

I\’m in the middle of making some improvements to the web site. Apologies for the confusion. If you\’re looking around and something appears broken, just hit refresh, and it might already be fixed.

First notable improvement, the latest blog entries are now on the front page instead of being buried in a separate section. All inbound links to archive entries are still the same, but links and bookmarks that pointed to http://www.tangophilia.com/blog/ should now simply point to http://www.tangophilia.com.

Just noticed that a reference to Tango blogs has been posted to the Tango-L listserv, and you all are stopping by .

Unfortunately for me, I haven\’t been keeping up with the blog portion recently. I do hope you find my thoughts helpful. Don\’t forget to also check out the current tango galleries to get a glimpse at the Argentine tango scene here in Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Carrboro.

I think I\’ve got a pretty good handle on separating my semantic markup from my CSS presentation code. It\’s a large part of the reason why the site design has been so straightforward to date. Less crazy presentation markup, the easier the site is to debug.

This also ensures that the site is accessible and easy to use on multiple platforms and browsers (including the browser on your web phone). In addition to the usual plethora of resources I like to consult on these things, it turns out that Mark Pilgrim, one of my students and a wonderful blogger, has published a very helpful site on the topic of accessibility, and I\’ll be implementing a lot of his recommendations on this site over time.

Going forward, you\’ll see some interesting changes to the site that will allow you to view the site under multiple designs (black-on-white vs. white-on-black, images vs. none, etc.) and to choose your favorite. In the Tangophilia spirit, I hope the site will be easy to use and understand, and yet demonstrate the power and beauty of the ideas and techniques behind it.

I\’ve rediscovered the joy of functions in PHP, and have cleaned up my pages to separate the presentation logic from the presentation code. Pages are about the same file size, but should be easier for me to maintain. From the perspective of you viewers, here are the two changes you might notice.

1. Presentation of date information is determined based on the date ranges of the event. Dates are presented differently based on whether the event is a single-date, multi-date or weekly event.
2. There\’s a little indicator on events that are less than 31 days away to let you know how many days are left until the event, or if a class is in progress, if you can still sign up.

The beauty of logical structures (and database driven sites) is that they make it possible to have things happen automatically because the software can follow the rules I set out. I would never have bothered to put this type of presentation on my old site because it was all hand-coded and I simply can\’t be bothered to update x-number of pages by hand on a frequent basis.

Of course, the question is, will anybody find these changes helpful? Maybe, maybe not. But just like in tango, sometimes it\’s worthwhile to explore some ideas because the exercise will open up other possibilities, and because small and subtle improvements can add up to bigger improvements over the long term.

Well, I\’ve checked a few pages deep on Google for \”tango blog\” and \”argentine tango blog\”, and I appear to be the first and only. Lots of blogs mention tango once or twice, but aren\’t using it as a primary focus. There are one or two sites that were started or referenced as tango blogs, but they\’re effectively vaporware. And one site that uses blogging software to run an otherwise standard website, not a blog as such.

My photos of the wedding and reception have been uploaded here.

Thanks, Mark for helping me get in touch with my inner blog-fiend. As an homage to Mark, I published my first moblog post via my Sprint PCS Wireless Web/Handspring Deluxe combo during today\’s wedding reception, sometime between their first dance and the toasts.

I\’ve been running Textism\’s refer on the rest of the site for a while, then I expanded it to the gallery, but couldn\’t get it working on the blog until I realized everything in Movable Type needed to be switched over to PHP. Thanks to etc. for the \”converting to PHP\” guide which pointed out what I was missing.

I\’ve also added Textism\’s Google_hilite tool which will help the people finding the site via Google by highlighting the search terms that led them here. To try it, click on that Google link, then click the first link back to my site.

For those that care about this sort of thing…

The main site has now been converted to a full CSS layout (tableless, except for the upcoming events listing). The pages are all generated with PHP off a MySQL db. For convenience and power, I\’m using two other great site tools. The Gallery is being generated with PHP Gallery and this blog is being managed through the MovableType blogging system. Take a peek at the images in the gallery (hi-res images will only be available for galleries for limited times). Visit the fliers gallery so you can download, print and distribute fliers to your friends and colleagues. Don\’t forget to come back to visit this blog area – I\’m finally ready to start using it!