The Strathspey Server
Your resource for Scottish country dance and music
The Strathspey Server
Your resource for Scottish country dance and music
The Strathspey mailing list was established in August 1993. At that time Anselm was working as a student system administrator and general computer dogsbody at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Frankfurt. Having just installed a mailing list management package, and having some time on his hands while preparing for his final diploma exams (we all know how things like that make you desperate for distraction) he wondered idly why there wasn't an Internet newsgroup or mailing list specifically for the discussion of Scottish country dancing, which had become his favourite pastime after having taken up lessons in early 1991. Then he decided - one morning while stepping out of the shower, actually - to do something about that. He doesn't quite remember how he attracted the first few dozen subscribers, but as a matter of fact the list mushroomed at an amazing rate. (Thank goodness the university paid a flat fee for its Internet connectivity, so a few extra kilobytes of mail per day didn't matter. Actually, the extra mail traffic due to Strathspey usually vanished in the noise of all those students downloading stuff that we probably don't really want to know about ...)
The Strathspey Server came about soon afterwards when it seemed that an archive of past postings might be a nice thing. Obviously putting up more dance-oriented material wouldn't hurt either, and it gave Anselm an excuse for messing about with the Web, which at that time was still quite a new idea. In the meantime he had graduated and changed jobs inside the university, and the list and server followed him over in due course to the Department of Computer Science. Since then the list has settled down a bit, surviving a changeover to a new mail server machine when the clunky but extremely dependable DECstation 3100 was finally retired in mid-1998. However, the next big change came in 2001, when, at the age of almost 8 years, Strathspey left its native home and moved out into the world ...
Right now Strathspey (list and server) is being hosted on a Linux server which Anselm leases together with about a dozen other people. That server lives in a huge air-conditioned machine hall at a big German ISP's premises, with a nice fast permanent connection to the Internet and lots of bandwidth. Strathspey has also acquired its own, eponymous domain name (it turns out that strathspey.com and strathspey.net are already spoken for, but anyway strathspey.org is the one that Anselm really wanted to have) so you no longer need to remember that weird, long informatik.uni-frankfurt thing.
Incidentally, in 2000 Anselm was awarded the RSCDS Scroll of Honour for the contribution that the Strathspey list made towards the communication between Scottish country dancers all over the world. (This makes him the youngest Scroll recipient ever, by a margin of 25 years or so, and the second German to receive one at all.) However it seems that the award really ought to have gone to all Strathspey subscribers, since it was the community of Strathspey participants that made the list a (continuing) success. But that would have been a very awkward AGM! Anyway, thanks to all of you for taking part, it's been wonderful so far and will hopefully go on like this for a long time ...
Owing to harddisk problems, Anselm and his friends had to move all their stuff from the old leased server to a new one (which is faster with more disk space and more free connectivity to boot). Anselm took this opportunity to waste even more time (to the chagrin of his girlfriend) completely redoing the Strathspey system software — see the »Technical Details« section below. Hopefully this will take the list and server to new heights of usefulness. There are other exciting things planned for the near future ... stay tuned!
You're perfectly entitled just to browse or »lurk« but it would be great if you were to make a contribution to the list or server, however small. Answer a query. Announce an event. Tell a story. Post a dance. Give your opinion. Review a CD or dance book. Let us know how you like the list, or the server. If you're a bit shy or don't know whether what you'd like to post is all right for the list, then do not hesitate to ask Anselm at anselm@strathspey.org.
If you're serious about helping out, there are lots of areas that could use work. For example, over the years there have been many discussions on the list analysing the history and/or finer technical points of many dances, and it would be great to go through the archive, extract all that information, and add it to the dance database for convenient access. This does not mean that a single person would have to volunteer to read a backlog of nearly 50.000 messages (including lots of stuff that doesn't talk about any specific dances at all) — it would be easy to split this work into batches of, say, 500 messages (which would be about right for a rainy autumn weekend with not much else to do except the dishes and a social dance on the evening — we don't want to keep you from things you would rather do). Every little thing helps. Let us know if you're game.
The web site used to be operated by a nifty piece of software called Zope, which is given away for free by a company called Digital Creations, but has recently been moved over to a new, similar system written by Anselm himself — Zope really proved too unwieldy in the long run and also annoyed Anselm's server's co-owners by randomly taking up all of the server's CPU resources. To be honest, this has probably more to do with Anselm's sketchy knowledge of Zope arcana than with the system itself.
The new system (now in its second, completely rewritten incarnation) makes it easy to create families of web sites that by default present a unified look (the navigation bar on the left of every Strathspey web page, for example is automatically included from a single specification) and use lots of dynamic elements (see, for example, the clickable maps in the dance groups section, which are created on the fly from a database of dance groups). In fact much of the material on the site comes out of a database, so Anselm spends very little time hacking on boring repetitive HTML. There are lots of other things that he would like to try if he only had the spare time.
The mailing list runs on top of a program called Mailman, which is a powerful mailing list management package. It used to use another program called »ezmlm-idx«, but when Anselm and his friends moved to the very new server they decided to get rid of the »Qmail« mail server they were running until then in favour of the more modern and friendly Postfix, and since ezmlm-idx is fairly closely tied to Qmail that spelled the end of that package as far as Strathspey is concerned. Fortunately, from a user's point of view, the differences are not so big, and the Strathspey list has gained a Web interface into the bargain.
The university used to (without actually knowing about it ... but again, the extra CPU load, mail and web traffic, and disk space used didn't even show up in the statistics). Nowadays it is funded by Anselm - and at less than ten euros per month, not including labour, it's a reasonably cheap hobby! Of course it would be more trouble than it is worth to charge subscribers for the service, besides being against the idea of free exchange of views and information on the Internet (which Anselm finds quite important). In the case that you like Strathspey so much that you want something nice to happen to Anselm, he's always glad to find dance books and other SCD-related stuff in his mail box ... and if you send him something that you published, you might even get a review and lots of world-wide publicity out of it! Anselm also maintains a wish list at Amazon this is the German server because of postage costs, but Amazon accounts seem to work on all Amazon servers (hint, hint ...)
