A few weeks ago I took over as the 'Webmaster' for Folk Northwest, the website of the North West Federation of Folk Clubs and Folk NorthWest magazine.

When Mark Dowding first initiated the website, one feature he included was a 'Hiring Fair' - pages where performers could tout for business.

Over the years, this has grown, becoming difficult to manage, and some entries are now out of date.

Add to that the problem that Mark used Microsoft Frontpage, and his successor had to use Microsoft Expression Web because Frontpage no longer existed and nothing else appeared to be 'compatible'. Nett result, a lot of redundant is code bloating the pages, making them very difficult to edit.

I've taken the (rash?!) decision to go through the pages in raw HTML to weed out the rubbish, make the behaviour and appearance of the pages more uniform, but most importantly, bring things as up to date as I can.

My question to you all... I've tried to contact everyone represented in the Hiring Fair, and had only a few replies so far. Some email addresses are no longer current (they bounced) and one mobile telephone number had never belonged to the person listed... clearly it's not practical to check through every single detail, especially telephone numbers, so this is where you come in.

If you can look at the pages and shed any light on what you find. based on you knowing the people concered, I would be very grateful.

If you are a performer wishing to be represented, please let me have some blurb and a photograph, but please don't expect me to trawl the internet for your stuff - it's up to you if you want the publicity to do the work yourself, and I, for my part, will produce a page for you. Fair's fair!

For now, until the website is completely updated, you can contact me by email on fnw_at_lymmfolkclub.org.uk - don't forget to substitute @ for _at_ - the 'wrong' email address is to deter spambots!