the KlezmerShack

I've been gradually working my way out from under work, then catching up with listings and reviews. Still a ways to go. One move that may happen this year is into a "framework" website that will facilitate the listings, the calendar, the blog, all as one integrated piece. I've been mostly looking at something called "Drupal", which is written in a language I sort of understand (PHP) and which would be a great framework for many of the non-profits that I work with. Drupal was used by the Howard Dean campaign last year, which spawned a very, very interesting meta-Drupal project called "CivicSpace," which is now inching towards a first release. CivicSpace looks to me like "Drupal, plus all the cool community features that I've been looking for." We'll see.

So, one of the sites using the still-beta CivicSpace framework is Music Across America. Take a look at this calendar and tell me that it wouldn't be cool to have for the klezmershack calendar - we'd need the world, not just the US, but imagine being able to zero in on music and events relevant to Jewish music just my moving your mouse (or, one hopes, speaking or using alternative navigation devices, as needed or preferred)! If I can find a way to make more events more accessible - and to make it easy for bands, musicians, and venues to list events by themselves - we could really do something neat.