Lessons From TryContra

February 15th, 2023
contra, tech, trycontra
As I wrote yesterday, I recently brought my little contra dance search tool up to date. I realized I've been running it for ten years now, which seems like a good time to look back over the experience for lessons.

When I built it in 2013 I wrote:

Experienced dancers know how to use ContraDanceLinks.com, Dance Gypsy, and the DanceDB to find places they can go contra dancing, but those sites are too complex and confusing for me to want to give to a new dancer.

Here's what those dance-community focused sites looked like:

And here's what I built:

Almost the same as it is today:

I wanted to build something easy to use and was willing to give up pretty much everything else, and I think I succeeded at that. You put in your location, get a list of nearby dances, and click through to their sites for more information.

There were several other choices I made, primarily out of laziness:

  • The site is completely static: HTML, CSS, JS. The searching happens in your browser, since it only takes a few kB to store all the contra dances in the country.

  • No dependencies: vanilla JS using browser APIs only. Not even minified.

  • It's just a directory. I don't host pages for dances.

  • No accounts. If you want to update the listing for your dance you can email me.

  • Minimal information. Just a link, city, weekday, approximate frequency, and whether it's gender-free. No "1st and 3rd Sundays", pricing, addresses, hours, performers, etc. More details would mean more information to collect, but more importantly it would mean more information to go stale.

In retrospect I feel like these decisions turned out well: the site requires very little upkeep. I can leave it alone for years and it will keep chugging along, and every so often I get an email with a correction and make a small change to a text file.

(This has also given me a lot of experience at reading contra dance websites. I wrote advice for people making these sites in 2013, which I think is mostly still good, but at this point I'd also add specifying covid details and whether your dance is gender free.)

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, mastodon, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

On Apologizing To Kids

Everyone is so weird about apologizing to children.

via Thing of Things August 25, 2025

Against the Teapot Hold in Contra Dancing

The teapot hold is the most dangerous common contra dancing figure, so I’ve been avoiding it. The teapot hold, sometimes called a "courtesy turn hold,” requires one dancer to connect with their hand behind their back. When I realized I could avoid put…

via Emma Azelborn August 25, 2025

Little Puppy

She's very little and she likes to do stuff with me. She also likes to bark around and run around and jump around. She also likes to go to places with me and that's all I have.

via Nora Wise's Blog Posts August 23, 2025

more     (via openring)