What are the Webfeet diaries - how do they work?

Well, there is a little information in the help page which people who have followed the little questionmark icon might have already found. There's also a slightly more detailed overview of the scope and aims of the site - which is focused on English Ceilidh and moving out to related dance styles.

It is clear that a single site is not going to be able to include all information about a subject so webfeet certainly no claims to be exhaustive. Indeed, for information such as diary entries, a single site holding details, dates etc. is going to run out of steam pretty quickly. The information, dates, events etc don't get into the webfeet lists magically - information which is mailed has to be cut and pasted into the appropriate page.

So what is the alternative? Ideally groups running events would have their own pages and the webfeet scripts can read the 'where', 'when' and 'who' and include them in the main events lists and map.

Three reasons:

• It offers the bands and groups the most freedom in how they present their information. They can have as much or as little on their pages as they wish.
• Groups do not have to interact with any indexing machine directly, explicitly submitting events, changing or updating details.
• Having the minimum of information included in the collected diary entry (basically the date, who, where and a link) effectively refers browsers to your pages where you can judge the interest in the band or event by looking at the Web server logs.

Unfortunately the webfeet scripts (a small program which goes round reading the various band's gigs lists) is pretty basic, it cannot pick out the date info from the HTML text itself. The way round this is to have the date, band, caller and location specially marked up so that the webfeet scripts can recognise them.

What to do? First of all, have a look at some of the existing pages in their HTML source form. This will show what sort of extra tags are required for the webfeet scripts to work out things like dates, dance styles, band names etc.

The current tags are written up in the Technical docs (have a look) and there are some template files (based round a list, a simple table and a table using background colours) which you can save from within your browser and edit.

It is hoped that simple syntax checker can be set up which will ask for a URL, read the page and display the diary information it understands from the page - and which would appear in webfeet diaries.

After including the tags in your pages contact me and I will set up the links so the Webfeet scripts read your pages. The scripts do not search for pages in the way Lycos does, the URL's have to be submitted manually.

(In the longer term it is likely that with the move to HTML3 these tags will be superceded by the rather more purpose designed <DIV CLASS="....."> or <SPAN CLASS="....."> entities or XML)