DanceMinder is temporarily down for a security upgrade.
The site should be back online by 11:30pm EST.
User Account Settings
If you’re not a member of DanceMinder you may be wondering what kind of information is saved as part of your account. Here’s a look at how to sign up and what information you need to supply and what’s optional.
The first step of course is to sign up. This can be done through the Account menu.
You’ll be taken to the Sign Up page where you can choose a User Name, password and where you can enter your email address.
Updates July 25, 2012
One big feature and several small tweaks this time. Multi-column Crib View and several link updates and site optimizations.
- The big item for this update is the addition of a multi-column format in the Crib View. It’s a bit experimental at the moment so the way columns are chosen and formatted will continue to be tweaked as the feature is used and we receive feedback.
By default the view will be displayed in single column as you’ve seen before.
Click on any of the images below to be taken to a live version of the example.
You may now select how many columns to be displayed, from 1-4.
DanceMinder will also save your selection and use it as the default for all future Crib views until you change your selection. Being an experimental feature, printing still needs some work to support the new multi-column formatting but will be fully enabled soon. - The Links menu item has been converted to a drop down menu and several useful links moved there such as our General links, Privacy Policy, Q&A, Contact Form and a new known (and fixed) issues page called Sausage.
- User/Editor view option has been moved to the Editor menu.
- Lots of little formatting tweaks and optimizations.
Updates July 21, 2012
There’s been a lot of activity today.
The Facebook community (Like it!) page and DanceMinder Blog have gone live with links between them and the main site. The main DanceMinder page has been modified to show the latest blog posts at the bottom of the page and the first article explaining the basic features of DanceMinder has gone up on the blog.
What will happen tomorrow?
What is DanceMinder for? Part I
At the core DanceMinder is a collection of dances. That may not sound like much and it would be understandable if you were thinking that if you wanted a collection of dances, you could buy a book. DanceMinder is actually much more than just a collection of dances.
DanceMinder was started because I (Michael) wanted a more dynamic way to display the dances and I wanted to be able to easily carry around all the dances I like without that being a small stack of reference cards like this:
or a large stack of books like well, imagine a large stack of books.
Over the course of several years we had built up a stack of laminated reference cards with just enough information that we could call or participate in a dance we didn’t know cold. Unfortunately as the stack grew it took more time to flip through it, looking for a specific dance. Alphabetizing helped but the sets seem to center around the letters ‘c’ and ‘s’ and on the dance floor it takes a while to page through them. Especially when Michael doesn’t put them back in order after an event. 🙂
We only ever had one copy of the cards so on the occasions where we weren’t in the same set or one of us was calling and the other dancing, one person was just out of luck unless we had the time beforehand to print out another copy.
It’s also not that unusual to reach into your pocket and take out your notes only to have them scatter across the floor after they slip out of your hand.
I wanted to be able to share these notes more easily with friends and students, so I started coding up the database and presentation and DanceMinder was born.