Round Reminders — Help

This system allows people to see the crib for a single dance on their phone, to save lists of dances so that they can load the programme for an event and call from it, and to print out various lists of cribs.

Help for users

The Round Reminders link in the main menu shows an index page with links to all the dances in alphabetical order, plus the following buttons:

Roles lets you specify role names (e.g. Larks and Robins) which will be used for viewing and printing dances.

Print List prints the displayed list of dances in alphabetical order, assuming A4 paper. On entry this will be the full list of dances, but see later. Notes (see later) will not be printed. You don't actually need to print the dances — you'll be given a web page containing the instructions and you may want to search it for something you're interested in.

List Core changes the displayed list to those dances in the Core Repertoire.

List Ball changes the displayed list to those dances in the Playford Ball programme — make sure it's this year's!

Build List lets you select your own programme and then print it out or save it on your device for later retrieval. In this mode the Build List button will turn yellow, and when you click a dance title the dance will be added to your list and its title will turn yellow — click a dance title again to remove it from the list. When your programme is complete, click Print List if you want a paper copy. Alternatively click the Save List button which has appeared to the right of the Build List button. If you give your list a name it will be saved with this name and a file type or .txt and the Build List button will now give the name of your list. If you cancel the Save, the Build List button will now say "Temp List". Click Build List again (whatever it's called!) to clear your list and return to normal mode.

Remember, a yellow button means "click me again to switch me off"!

Load List lets you load a list previously saved to your device.

Once you have the contents of your list displayed, two other buttons will appear. One is Update List. Click this to see the full list of dances, with the dances from your list in yellow, so that you can add or remove dances and then save the updated list. The other is Edit List. This shows the dances in your list and you can then use the buttons to reorder them. If you click "Cancel" nothing is changed. If you click "Save" you will see the dances in your list in your specified order.

Filter lets you filter the dances on formation, so the list will be reduced and Print List will print just the dances with the specified formation. The Filter button will turn yellow; click it again to clear the filter.

Help gives this page of instructions on how to use the system.

Home takes you to The Round Home page.

Login is for administrators who can update the dances.

Clicking a dance title displays the instructions for that dance and you can print it out or view it on your phone. Some dances have Notes at the end for further clarification or edification. At the top are the following buttons:

Index takes you back to the full list of dances.

Print prints this dance.

Music transfers to my site colinhume.com where musicians can print it out, callers and dancers can listen to it.

Video 1 / 2 / 3 give links to videos of the dance, either live dancers or an animation. The videos may not be exactly the same as the instructions we use, but callers may find them helpful in understanding the dance.

Phones and Browsers

There are many different kinds of phones with different browsers running on them. This has been our experience so far — pleaseContact meif you can give more information.

Google Chrome on Android

When you save a list you get no proper notification, but it has been saved. If you save an updated version it asks "Do you want to download --- again?" and you need to touch "Download" — if you touch "Cancel" the list will be displayed but it won't have been saved on your device. When you load a list you see "Choose an action" and you need to select "Documents". Then select the appropriate .txt file. Back in the web page, touch "Upload".

Firefox on iPhone

After building a list, saving with "Save List" might display a plain-text list of the dance file names, but going back to the previous page gets you back on track.

Safari on iPhone

This works well. Saved lists appear in the Files app. Tapping the entry displays the text. Touching the entry briefly produces a list of options including Rename and Delete. A renamed file can be retrieved with "Load List" as you'd expect.

Help for administrators

A folder called reminders contains:

reminder.php which contains all the code.
help.html which is this Help page
style.css which specifies the style of various elements — e.g. headings are this size in this font with this colour.
formations.txt which lists the available formations, e.g. "Longways duple".
Core.txt which lists the dances in the Core Repertoire.
Many files of dance instructions, with names of the form Dressed_Ship.dance
!index.dance which isn't a real dance and won't be shown to ordinary users — it's the text displayed at the top of the index page which an administrator may want to update.

You shouldn't need to know the format of a dance file, but it's a simple text file — here's an example:

Title|Apley House Source|Henry Playford, 1702 Formation|Longways duple Music|Apley House Video1|vEREROTs30E Instructions|A1: Men take hands and fall back a double; come forward turning single. Then women the same. A2: R-hand star half-way, turn single. 2nd couple, followed by 1st couple, cast down into line of 4 facing up, 1st couple outside. B: Forward a double and back, 1st couple falling into 1st place (all improper). 1st couple cast down into 2nd place and cross over, while 2nd couple lead up into 1st place, crossing. Notes|This is an example of a Notes field which will appear for a single dance but not with Print All.

Most elements are on a single line; Instructions and Notes are on several.

Formations.txt simply has one line for each formation. If Formation is Other this won't appear on the user's listing — instead you need to specify the formation as the first line of the instructions, I suggest in italics, e.g. 5 Couple horseshoe: One couple at the top and two couples on each side

An Administrator has one extra item in the main menu: New which creates a new dance — this also appears when you're editing a dance.

When you click a dance title you are given the following editable boxes:

° Title expects any article to be at the start, e.g. "The Bishop", "An Enchanted Place".

° Source could be publisher and date, or choreographer, composer and date, and can include a website link — to an interpretation, or to the instructions on the Pat Shaw website for instance — it's free-format, so anything goes!

° Formation uses a drop-down list to ensure consistency.

° Music allows you to specify the tune name (often the same as the dance name) so that the user can see or hear the music on my site. This involves a lot of complex code which I'm not going to copy to the Round's server — it wouldn't work on that anyway! To list all the tunes on my site:colinhume.com/abc.aspx?title=*and then start typing until you find what you want. This will have an address of https://colinhume.com/abc.aspx?T=what_ever and you just want to copy what_ever (any underscores will automatically be replaced by spaces) though you can just copy the whole link and the first part will be removed when you Save the dance.

° Video1 / Video2 / Video3 are links to videos. If these are on YouTube all you need give is the code at the end of the URL (after v=) though if you give the full URL starting either https://youtu.be/ or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= this will be removed when you Save the dance. If it's one of George Williams' animations you only need id=nnnn but if what you enter includes upadouble.info/dance.php?id=nnnn this will be reduced on Save. If it's somewhere else you need to give the full URL starting http. For YouTube you can also use &t specify a start time in seconds, e.g. _h4CpVkPFJ8&t=103 or in minutes and seconds, e.g. _h4CpVkPFJ8&t=1m43s. Please detail in the Notes field if this differs from the way the instructions describe it, e.g. "We would dance the three changes with hands". Once you Save a dance, the appropriate Video buttons will appear for this dance. One good place to find a list of Playford-style videos is lambertvillecountrydancers.org/videolist.php

Some callers will probably find George Williams' animations clearer than watching real dancers, and he often gives lots more information. If you want to add an animation, don't give a link to a YouTube video, which may be superseded. Instead go to George's page:upadouble.infoand search for the title you want — there may be more than one interpretation, as with Apley House. If George's site disappears, and no-one has yet decided how to handle dead links on the internet, it will be easy for the webmaster to find the latest version on archive.org and change the code to link to that instead.

° Instructions: I'm putting in A1: A2: etc and I recommend that you do the same. You can specify italic and bold text — just don't try and get too clever! If you really want to emphasise something, e.g. "Twos improper" in a 3 couple dance, use Twos improper which will appear in bold with a red background and (you'd hope) couldn't be missed.

° Notes is extra information which will appear when the user views a single dance but won't appear with Print List. The same goes for text within [square brackets]. If there are no italics specified in Notes, the entire field will be shown to a user in italics.

Extra menu items:

New creates a blank dance template.

Delete asks you to confirm and then deletes the current dance.

View as user shows you how a non-admin user will see the dance you're editing, with a button to take you back to the edit screen. You must Save your changes before using this!

I'm not willing to produce an A6 booklet containing all the dances — that requires good knowledge of a word processor such as Microsoft Word which I don't have — but maybe someone else would like to take on the task. In that case it could be printed from the index page.

PleaseContact meif you have any questions or comments about the dances or the software.

Colin Hume, 8-Aug-24