Dance Weekend

I put out a call for help among my graphic designer friends and a good friend from my years in San Diego totally stepped up for me!  The logo she designed is perfect or Dance Weekend.  First, it’s distinctive and scales niceley to the little 75 – 90 pixel square boxes social networking sites put us in.  Gah, so so so much better than that horrible thing I made for Lindy Weekend.  Thanks again, Kat, you rock!

The new Dance Weekend logo!

Gah, and I’m not sure what’s up with that funky border that wordpress is putting around/through the image.  Just ignore that

Last night, I was feeling a little guilty that, there I was starting a blog about major dance weekends around the country and The Atlanta Varsity Showdown was wrapping up and I hadn’t managed to get to a single dance, workshop, or competition.  So I hopped in the truck and headed over to the venue where the final dance of the weekend was taking place.  I wasn’t planning on dancing, just socializing a bit to get a feel for how AVS had gone. (And it seems to have gone pretty well by most accounts!  Good job to Dean Robert and his ASEDA faculty.)

I had a good time socializing with both local and out-of-town dancers and noted that everyone looked good and whipped, which is usually a good sign in the waning hours of a workshop weekend.  Everyone, that is, except Javier Johnson, who never seems to get tired.  Ever.  It was a pleasant surprise to see him back in town for AVS.

But I’m most excited about setting up an interview with a young lady I’ll be interviewing tonight at Hot-Jam.  She’s a relatively new Atlanta dancer who I’d never met but she seems to definitely have the dancing bug.  In addition to AVS, she’s signed up to attend the Eastern Balboa Championships in Raleigh-Durham at the end of this month.

This will be my first interview and I’m a little nervous.  But you all love me, so it’s all good, right?  She’s new to Balboa so I plan to have both a before and after interview to hear her expectations for an out-of-town event and also how well the event lived up to those expectations.  She was the housing coordinator for AVS so we’ll see how well she likes the hotel events.

I’m not sure yet whether I’ll post the interviews separately or if I should wait and put them together after the event.  Either way, the interviews will eventually be posted right here on DanceWeekend.  So subscribe, add, follow, friend me up, beam me up, whatever.

And I’ll see you on the dance-floor!

Lindy Weekend is being reborn, rewritten, and re-branded as Dance Weekend!  I really enjoyed writing the original Lindy Weekend site and application on Facebook for the Lindy Hop community.  Unfortunately, due to my hectic schedule and the sheer number of dance events that happen every weekend, I just couldn’t keep up with entering information about upcoming events.  Eventually, I got so behind on entering event info that I definitely never had time to add any cool features. Eventually, I got so overwhelmed, LindyWeekend sat dormant for about a year.

Although I gave up on entering new events, I never gave up on the idea of a social dance calendar.  If only I could figure out how to deal with the data-entry side of things.  At one point, I even considered farming out the work the some off-shore workers through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service.  Then one day, after I got a Facebook Event invitation from about the 1000th dance event that I, sadly, couldn’t attend, it hit me:  Why should I be entering event information in the first place when the organizers are already entering it?!  After all, every event worth it’s salt has a Facebook events page and the Facebook API makes this information freely available to Facebook Apps through its API.  All I had to do was ask for it.  To make things even better, Facebook will even tell me who’s going or not.  I had one of those, “duh, why didn’t I think of this sooner?” moments, for sure.

A long time ago, Alan Anicella had asked me about the possibility of making a “Westie Weekend” (What an awesome name!).  So with the data entry problem solved, I dug out the old code for Lindy Weekend and started looking at what it would take to break the app into multiple genres.  After about five minutes of poking around, I decided it wasn’t worth the effort to refactor the code (due to layers upon layers of poor design decisions the first time around) and decided to start over from scratch.

And that’s pretty much where we are today.  I renamed lindy Weekend app and uploaded the new bare-ones code.  It doesn’t do much yet but I’m very excited out where it’s headed because now that I won’t be spending all of my spare time re-typing event information, I can work on adding the types of features i originally had in mind when I first began the Lindy Weekend project.

Be on the lookout for cool new features coming to Dance Weekend.  In fact, make it easy on yourself and add DanceWeekend on twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

See you on the dance-floor!