Round Reminders — Help

This is a system which allows people to see the crib for a single dance on their phone and also print out various alphabetical lists of cribs — in effect an updated version of Palmer's Pocket Playford. It's not yet complete.

Help for users

A new entry on page round.soc.srcf.net/dances#dances links to reminder.php which 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 All prints the whole set of dances in alphabetical order, assuming A4 paper. Notes (see later) will not be printed.

Print Core prints the instructions for the Core Repertoire.

Print Ball prints the Playford Ball programme — make sure it's this year's!

Build List lets you select your own programme and then print it out. In this mode, when you click a dance title the dance will be added to your list and the title will turn yellow — click a title again to remove it from the list. When your programme is complete, click Print List. Click Cancel Build to return to normal mode.

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 are allowed to update the system.

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. There are the following buttons:

Index takes you back to the full list of dances.

Download allows you to download the whole dance as a text file — an Admin user may want to make changes offline, then come back to copy and paste the amended instructions.

Print prints this dance in a format similar to that used by Palmer's Pocket Playford.

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

Help for administrators

A folder called reminders contains:

reminder.php containing 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 titles of dances in the Core Repertoire.
Many files of dance instructions, with names of the form Apley_House.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 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 editable boxes: Title, Source, Formation, Music, Instructions and Notes. Title expects any article to be at the start, e.g. "The Bishop". 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. I'm putting in A1: A2: etc in Instructions and I recommend that you do the same. You can specify italic and bold text — just don't try and get too clever! Notes is extra information which will appear when the user views a single dance but won't appear with "Print All". 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.

Menu items:

Help and Home as before.

New creates a blank dance template.

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

View as user lets you see how a non-admin user will see the dance you're editing, with a button to take you back to the edit screen.

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).

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.

Colin Hume, 18-Jun-24