This might be interesting for folks working on marketing square dancing: National Marketing Institute, put on by the National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association. From the blurb:

[T]his event takes proven marketing principles and adapts them to the perspective of professionals working in non-profit recreation, sports, and fitness. It’s the only professional development event of its kind. You’ll take home a new perspective on how you can use the principles of marketing to make sure your valuable programs, services, and facilities reach your customers. And, with the understanding that most attending marketing professionals don’t have big budgets, everything is targeted to making the most with limited resources.

Got back Monday from Anchors Aweigh with a Half Sashay, the IAGSDC’s annual square dance convention. It was very fun, as always, and since I was on staff and working, it was more than usually tiring. The convention committee did a great job, especially in putting together interesting caller pairings and theme sessions (there was a contra session, which was very successful (I heard, since I couldn’t be there), a Fifties dance session, hexagon squares (both called by Bill Eyler), and some “extreme” sessions). Probably the most successful caller pairing (at least in terms of attendance…I heard the hall was completely packed, with people waiting outside the door to get in…but I couldn’t be there…) was the Ya-ya Sisterhood hour, featuring Deborah Carroll-Jones and Anne Uebelacker.

It was all very fun, and now I’m suffering from post-convention letdown; it’s always sad to say goodbye to people that I won’t see for another year.

Check out this picture. It was taken at a Danish park.

So this guy’s dad was a caller between 1968 and 1978. He would bring home his “unit” (sort of sounds like a Califone, with a speaker in the cover) and records and practice calling. Afterwards, his kids could play their favorite records and sing along, using the mic. “Wicked fun!”

Yesterday, I wrote about ads appearing when you do a Google search. Google also has a program, called AdSense, that can display ads on personal websites that are related to the contents on the page. The site owner gets paid per click (currently $0.50, but I’ve heard that it’s lessening). You can get a preview of the kinds of ads that would appear on your page here; just enter your URL and see the ads. Here are the ads that would appear on my current front page if I participated in the program:

Obviously, the June as Accordian month post has an impact.

I also wrote that there no ads appear when you search for “square dance” or “square dancing” on Google. This is true; however, there is a square dance ad that appears when looking at the rec.folk-dancing newsgroup through Google Groups. Here’s the ad:

and it links here: Square Dancing in Palo Alto

However, with a page refresh, the ad was replaced. My guess is the Palo Alto group put a fairly low limit on how much they’re willing to spend, so the ad appears less frequently.

When you search Google for, say, “floor refinishing,” you’ll get your search results, and you’ll also get some discrete ads over on the right hand side of your window. When you search for “square dance” or “square dancing,” there are no ads.

When you look at the AdWords info, you see that the ads are based on the search words. Advertisers pay with a complicated formula based on how much they’re willing to pay per click.

So, no ads means that nobody wants to pay to advertise to square dancers (or people searching for “square dance” on google). Hmmm…seems like a good opportunity for the folks at “Square Dancing Today” to reach people who might have an interest in the magazine.

On the day I left for AACE for three days of extreme mental and physical exercise (8 hours of dancing per day), USA Today and other news services reported a study on the effect of mental exercise on dementia, including Alzheimer’s. The study, which was set to appear in the New England Journal of Medicine on June 19, 2003 (abstract), asked people to keep track of how many times per week they did various activities. Researchers from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City found seniors who participated in mind-stimulating leisure activities had a lower risk of developing dementia.

The activities that showed the greatest risk reduction were reading, board and card games, and playing a musical instrument. Of physical activities, only dancing was associated with risk reduction.

Here’s one writeup of the study: HealthScout-Seniors-Rx for the Mind: Mind Games.
And here’s another link: Health News

Now, let’s think about square dancing, especially advanced and challenge square dancing: It has all the features of a game AND it’s non-sedentary. We already know that exercise is good for longevity…why not get involved in an activity that gives you a mental workout as well.

We’re heading off to the Academy for Advanced and Challenge Enthusiasts today. I can get 27 hours of C3A (if I have the stamina…), see old friends, and meet new people. What fun! Now to just try to once again relearn my C3A definitions.

Vic has released a new version of CSDS. Looks like it might fix some of the little irritations I’ve had with the current version. Vic will be at AACE; it’s amazing that he’s had time to put out a new release of CSDS while getting ready for the weekend (or maybe he didn’t want to listen to complaints all weekend ).

There’s a thread over on rec.folk-dancing on barn dances (aka one night stands). Also one on teenage dancers.

I’ve put up an archive of the sd-callers email list. It was archived at yahoo groups, but, as I’ve mentioned before, that archive ran out of space in November 2001. Since there’s a lot of good stuff discussed on the list, it seemed a shame for it to vanish into the giant bitbucket in the sky. I know that a lot of list subscribers keep their own archive, but many don’t.

First, I researched the various (free) archive mechanisms available. I was tempted by The Mail Archive, but they didn’t have an easy mechanism to import old messages (and I was looking at 26692 messages just through November 2001). I figured someone must have written an mbox to mysql database converter, but it seems that it’s a fairly hard problem. I have a predilection for databases, so that was definitely my first thought (after first trying to put it in some other archiving service). I did find mail2mysql, but at the time, I was intimidated by perl. (Now, after working with mhonarc (perl), I could probably set this up (and I might in the future)).

After looking at various email archives on line, it seemed like most were using either Hypermail or MHonArc to “HTML-ize” email. I liked the look of Mhonarc, and the support looked good, so I decided to go with it. I also looked at mharc, a collection of perl scripts using MHonArc to automate the updates for a collection of mailing lists, but it uses the Namazu search engine, and I couldn’t get it to compile under Mac OS X (issues with redefinitions of getopt, in case you’re interested).

Since I was only going to do one email list, I figured I could write the automation scripts myself, so I gave up on mharc (although I did crib the mhonarc resource files and CSS file).

The next step was to get all the yahoo archives into an mbox format. Fortunately, I found a script to do this: yahoo2mbox: Archiver for Yahoo! Groups. Since yahoo has a daily bandwidth limit for each group, it took several days to grab all the email messages into one 72.5 MB file. I used a utility script from mharc to break the mbox file into separate mbox files for each month. I used the same script on my own mbox archives to get the messages sent after November 23, 2001.

I also researched search engines, and decided to go with ht://Dig. Compilation was a breeze; no tweaking at all. Installation wasn’t too bad…a little trial and error to get the directories set up appropriately.

After playing with the MHonArc resource files and a lot of trial and error, I got them set up to look and work okay. I wrote a PHP script to do the navigation to the previous and next index pages, and a PHP script to generate the main index page. I decided to add a subject index and an author index, as well as the standard date and thread indices.

Then I wrote a shell script to call MHonArc for each monthly archive, and sat back. After a few (well, a bunch) of minutes, MHonArc had created the HTML files for the approximately 30000 messages and the index files for each month. I tarred and gzipped them up, and transferred them over from my work machine (a Mac G4/DP 450) to my server machine (a Mac G3 300). I installed htdig, tested it, did a little trial and error stuff, and let it rip on the sd-callers files.

Once it looked okay, I announced it on the sd-callers list and started watching my log files. Then I decided that I would install a logfile analysis program. I picked AWStats, because that’s the one I use and like for squarez.

After all the other installations I’d done, AWStats was a breeze…copy a few files into the right places, modify a configuration file, and run it.

In the process, I learned to use CPAN a little bit (yahoo2mbox required several modules that weren’t installed on my machine), learned to read a little perl, learned a lot about MHonArc, learned that the shell is really terrible for string manipulation, but that bash is a little better than the others, and a lot of other stuff. It’s great to running a system that makes using all the gnu public license software pretty easy (as easy as it can be, given that the documentation is usually written by coders for sysops who are assumed to have a lot of background knowledge.

The sd-callers archives is limited to sd-callers subscribers. If you are a subscriber, you’ve seen the announcement.

It’s the first Friday the 13th of the year, aka Blame Someone Else Day…perfect for square dancers, since it’s never our fault when a square breaks down.

Turn to your corner and say:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
If I mess up,
I’m blaming you!

Turn to your corner and say

Roses are red,
Sunflowers are taller.
If we mess up,
We’ll just blame the caller!

And while we’re at it, callers can blame dancers, dancers can blame callers, and both can blame CALLERLAB for square dancing’s decline.