New Hampshire Country Dance Fiddle Tunes Website

Here are some plans for future updates. This section is for my benefit; if it's written in here it's more likely to happen. But I make no promises.

• I plan to include a section on learning by ear vs. learning by ear, to be updated from an earlier version of this website. It will look at how each produces different results and at some possibilities for using them together productively.
• I will work on the explanations of using abc and playable tune pages, try to make them more compact, and try to make them into clones of a standard so I can update once and have every page using it update automatically.

Sun. May 15. I renamed the section about choosing chords to About the Music. That allows me to put in a variety of topics related to the tunes. When the section on learning by ear vs. from music is finished I will give it a different section header. I also added the capability to do a search of the web site. The search is at the very top of the header on every page. The interface for this section is improved. Each year's news can be viewed separately so the section takes less room on the page. There's now a section for major website news.

Wed. May 11. I announced the website on the Maine Fiddle Camp Facebook page. This was the first announcement to the New England music and dance community.

Fri. May 6. Last-minute corrections and updates - the site is now reasonably ready to be made public.

Sun. May 1. I'm finishing up repairing bugs in the menus and checking each page to makke sure it works.

Tues. April 26. The menu system is largely finished and should be much easier to update in the future.There are a few more details and some checking, but mostly it's reached a presentable state.

Sat. April 16. I just updatd the menu system to work somewhat better and to be more uniform across the website. All pages now have the same Main Menu. All pages in a section have the same section menu.

Sun. April 3. I added a page on doing custom searches. The searches use regular expressions but aren't too complex, and can return tunes rather than tune titles as with the Tune Index.

Wed. March 30. The Tune Index has been considerably enhanced. There are now three links for each tune. One goes to a page containing abc code for the tune. One goes to a page containing that tune in playable form. The third goes to a page contining all playable tunes for that type (e.g. Jigs, Reels). The single tune loads faster but the page of tunes is good for browsing.

Mon. March 21. As of today the website has been made public! I announced on abcusers today, and will announce it in a few other places shortly.

Mon. March 21. I finished checking things and correcting any problems I could find. I was able to partially implement a suggestion from Jean-François Moine to implement playable tune pages so the tunes could be viewed one at a time; that greatly speeds things up from loading the entire page at once.

Sat. March 12. I completed the job of making menus more uniform, and solved some dificult problems related to why some just wouldn't cooperate. It turns out that my browser was misbehaving and once fxed it things went a whole lot better! I also corrected nearly every other iconsistency I could find, and figured out how to make the help pop-up windows work on Playable Tunes pages. I updated the abc Help File. I'm sure there are more changes but that's what I remember.

Tues. Feb. 1. I've been working on making the menus more uniform and easy to use. Also doing various other things to polish up some of the pages and eliminate problems, etc. Almost ready!

Sat. Jan. 15. I realized I could combine three pages into one and make it much easier to find things. Of course now I have to go through and make sure all my links and descriptions are correct.

Thurs. Jan. 13. I liked my new spreadsheet for sortng tunes enough that I added it to the website for download.

Wed. Jan. 12. I've been proofreading, spell checking and doing various other last-minute things. I keep finding miinor and occasionally more important things that need to be redone. But it's possible the time has come to put this online and startletting people know about it!

Sun. Dec. 26. I think I've got the menus working on all pages now, and all writing for the first incarnation of this website are done. I revised the abc introduction and split it between several pages. Time for proofreading and editorial work.

Mon. Dec. 20. The standard menus don't work on most pages containing playable tunes and sometimes other forms of custom HTML code. I've been working on replacing them with custom menus. I also replaced all the standard menus with a different style of menu that's more likely to work with a variety of different devices. I also redid the About abc Notation pages as they contain playable abc tunes which interfere with tabbed pages. I turned the tabs into separate pages.

Sat. Dec. 11. The menus are completed for the abc pages as well as the Playable Tunes pages. I designed a spreadsheet to generate the menu HTML code from basic information about the links.

Thurs. Dec. 2 The biggest development of the past few months is that I learned how to use abc notation to put tunes on web pages in standard notation. Furthermore those tunes can be played by clicking on them.

• This makes it much easier to figure out which tunes you might be interested in learning, and helps you learn tunes even if you don't read music.
• It's also useful for the section on chord development, as now you can hear directly how different chords result in the tune having very different sounds. It's also forced me to redo parts of the website as it changes the focus in some ways.

I also figured out how to make up a searchable tune index, and to put links for each tune to the page it's on in the Playable Tunes section and in the abc category pages. This makes navigating the website much easier. And finally I learned how to make up menus linking to other pages and to tunes on the page in the Playable Tunes section, and possibly in the abc tune category pages. This is useful because the standard menus don't work on those pages.

Mon. Aug. 23. I finished the reorganization of the website. There is now a clear home page and room for future development. I experimented with doing a version of the tunebook made with page layout software rather than in EasyABC. That would make it look a lot better and would let me put the tunes together much more efficiently. But it's a big effort and will at best take months to complete.

February – August 2021. I started the website in early February. Much of it came together fairly quickly as I was able to borrow a lot from the Dance website.

• The biggest issue was presentation of the tunes. The old website has a download page very similar to the current one and pages of abc code which hasn't changed much. It seemed like I should be able to present a page in which based on a user-defined search, the abc code for the resulting group of tunes would be presented.
• I tried spreadsheets (Excel and Zoho; both can be embedded in a website). Everything was great except the resulting code would have two double quotation marks before and after ever chord, and lots of quotation marks where they weren't wanted. After much time spent on this approach I gave it up.
• Then I tried using a database (Airtable). I had to learn the software and some of the tricks to get it to do things it doesn't normally do. Finally I got a workable database that I could embed into a website, although I made a major revision to it.
• I discovered that in the process of using spreadsheets to get my abc code ready for the spreadsheets and then the database I had introduced errors into the code, so I spent time catching as many errors as I could (including some I'd made while writing out the abc code.
• Finally when I thought I was nearly there I looked at the overall design of the website and decided it needed work, so I developed a better organization and filled in the parts that needed work. I also realized that most of the old website was now included in the new one, so I added in spaces to put the rest of the old website without needing further reorganization.

July 2019 – January 2021. During this time very little was done with this website although I transcribed quite a few tunes. During much of this time I was working on the Dance website.

Tues. July 2. I discovered that the links in the Tune List hadn't been updated when I had to change the URLs for all pages a while ago. Links are now updated and should work correctly.

Sun. June 30. I updated the Sources listing to include the new tunes. I'm also including downloadable versions of the Sources listing in various formats.

Wed. June 26. Lots of changes over the past three months. There are some new tunes on the main Tunes page. I added a footer to each page with an overview of the web site.

Thurs. Mar. 6. Lots of minor changes. I updated the chord extraction spreadsheet, and updated and added in the chord book template.

Sun. Feb. 16. Lots of internal details were updated and corrected. I also updated the Fiddle home page to have a more explicit site map to be more welcoming to new visitors.

Thurs. Feb. 14. There was a problem with where the site was uploading to, which I figured out from the fact that some images weren't displaying. After working with MacHighway tech support (where it's hosted) that's straightened out. But the URL of all pages has changed and all links in the site to other pages listed as a URL had to be changed.

Sat. Feb. 9. The site should be in generally good shape. I updated the LRB page, and added in the pages on choosing chords.

Tues. Jan. 9. I've made some corrections to links that weren't working correctly, and updated the Lamprey River Band page concerning upcoming plans.

Sun. Dec. 23. Uploaded the second version of the web site. There are still problems but they are decreased. Responsive font sizing of body fonts needs to be improved. Menus and links need to be checked.

Sat. Dec. 22. All pages have been updated and the site is nearly ready to update online.

Wed. Dec. 19. Nearly every page has been updated to improve formatting on smaller screens. I've also tightened up and edited contents of most pages and improved the discussion of headers. I've added a page for Lamprey River Band updates. I'll be uploading all these updates shortly.

Wed. Nov. 14. Uploaded the web site for the first time! There are a number of problems to take care of over the next few days.

Fri. Oct. 26. I added in this news section to have a record of changes made. I also added the Contact Form, and the PDF with all the tunes.