Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released

Subject: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: GUEST,Robert B. Waltz
Date: 26 Feb 23 - 04:38 PM

If this is too much shameless self-promotion, Joe, please close off this thread and I won't do it again. I haven't done this here before, but the other places I announce things are gradually losing their readership....

Anyway, this is to announce that version 6.5 of the Traditional Ballad Index, with more than 1400 new references, notes, and whatnot; there are now entries for 16734 songs (818 of which have at least 500 words of notes and background apart from the bibliographic references).

Links:

Ballad Index Search Page (it may take a day or two for Google to update this):
http://www.fresnostate.edu/folklore/BalladSearch.html

Ballad Index Song List with Song Descriptions:
http://www.fresnostate.edu/folklore/Contents.html

Ballad Index Song List without Song Descriptions (faster):
http://www.fresnostate.edu/folklore/ShortContents.html

Ballad Index main page/Table of Contents:
http://www.fresnostate.edu/folklore/BalladIndexTOC.html

Ballad Index Special Articles list:
http://www.fresnostate.edu/folklore/BalladIndexArticles.html

---

Note from Joe Offer: The new home for the Traditional Ballad Index is:

https://balladindex.org/

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: Joe Offer
Date: 26 Feb 23 - 04:50 PM

Thanks, Bob. The "Ballad Index Song List with Song Description" is a great idea, but it's such a big file that it tends to crash my browser. I'm glad you have the "short contents" file also. I open that file, and then use CTRL-F to search it. I use it all the time.

-Joe-

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: GUEST,Robert B. Waltz
Date: 26 Feb 23 - 05:20 PM

Joe Offer wrote:

The "Ballad Index Song List with Song Description" is a great idea, but it's such a big file that it tends to crash my browser. I'm glad you have the "short contents" file also. I open that file, and then use CTRL-F to search it. I use it all the time.

A file with 30,000 links in it is always going to put pressure on browsers, and throwing in 60,000 div tags just makes it worse. :-( But there isn't any real way to shrink it. It does work on some machines -- it loads almost instantly in Firefox on both Intel and ARM macs, e.g.

The alternative is the Google or DuckDuckGo search engines, but they're both surprisingly bad (DuckDuckGo being worse than Google); they aren't good at figuring out what is important in a bibliographic entry.

I'm always thinking about ways to make this easier, but time I spend programming is time I don't spend researching, and given that my programming skills are a third of a century out of date, I'm probably more usefully employed in researching. :-)

For people who are going to use the Index a lot -- song researchers, e.g. -- I genuinely recommend downloading the Ballad Index software, which is based on FileMaker Pro. Its search options are vastly superior to what Google does, because it allows searching by fields.

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: Chris Wright
Date: 27 Feb 23 - 06:38 AM

Just wanted to post my appreciation for the Ballad Index - it's a fabulous resource which, to echo Joe, I use all the time!

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: Joe Offer
Date: 21 Mar 23 - 10:41 PM

From Bob Waltz:

Balladeers --

This morning brought a shocking revelation: CSU Fresno had taken down the Traditional Ballad Index. Just... gone. Not even a message to us that they had taken it away.

It's going to take a while to get everything rebuilt, but I think -- I hope -- we're starting to get it to work again. The pages for the songs are back. Everything else will have to be rebuilt, I fear, so it's going to take a few days. But you can find the songs by TITLE here:
http://balladindex.org/ShortContents.html


I'll be uploading the other files as I can get them fixed. You won't find much right now at the main site balladindex.org, but things should gradually appear over the next few days.

Robert B. Waltz

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 21 Mar 23 - 11:09 PM

This is where the Internet Archive will come to the rescue. They crawl and save lots of sites. Here is the first link in your first post, but entered into the Internet Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.fresnostate.edu/folklore/BalladSearch.html

At the top of the page there is a line of years with black bars representing each occasion when they saved a copy of the page. Choose the year and then scroll down and look for the blue highlight on a date (it will tell you how many shots on that date). That material is saved, and even if it isn't the complete thing (if there are links off of the page they may not be saved) you have a starting point.

The Wayback Machine may have copies of a lot of what you lost. Visit Web Archive.org and enter the ORIGINAL full URL into the search line, then scroll down to see all of the dates on which the Internet Archive crawled and captured information on the page.

If you find this helpful, please consider donating to the cause. These folks really stepped up during the last administration to save thousands of pages of government department pages taken down in the name of misinformation. They also house a lot of Mudcat pages.

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 21 Mar 23 - 11:12 PM

You also need to speak to the campus IT folks and ask if they will give you a full backup of all of that data.

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 22 Mar 23 - 12:15 AM

Mr. Robert B. Waltz,

THANK YOU

Sincerely,
Gargoyle



Fresno State has become, in the last decade, a behemoth in folk legacy.

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 22 Mar 23 - 12:23 AM

No ....No.....NO!

It cannot be gone.

Sincerely,
Gargoyle

There must be a host somewhere, without the politics of government, or local universities.

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: Reinhard
Date: 22 Mar 23 - 03:16 AM

Bad luck, Bob!

But it looks that the move of the static pages to the new site went quite straightforward so far. Thanks for your hard word over all the years - the Traditional Ballad Index is a ressource I would severely miss.

By the way, my site Mainly Norfolk is 10 year old this month at its current location, after it was running for 17 years at my university. At least they told me to go away and didn't just delete the contents.

And Stilly, the Internet Archive is a great source for stuff that is really gone. Bob still has all his contents, though, so he "only" had/has to put it at a new place and probably re-work the search function (which wouldn't work in the Internet Archive anyway).

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: GUEST,Robert B. Waltz
Date: 22 Mar 23 - 02:31 PM

And We're (mostly) Back.

The new, and I hope lasting, URL is balladindex.org. All files are restored, and I hope all links work. (Although honesty compels me to admit that there are probably a few that are broken. :-) In any case, the main links work.

What doesn't work, yet, is the search engines, either the Google or the DuckDuckGo editions. You can type into them, but they don't find anything. Since neither one works, I'm guessing that this is because I just created the site yesterday. So they will presumably come around eventually. I hope. If not, I guess I keep recreating them until they do. :-)

While we wait for that to happen, you can find songs using the Contents lists if you know the title. The Quick Contents loads faster and has a smaller browser footprint but forces you to click on the song to know if it's the right one; the Full Contents shows you the song description if you hover over the name, so you can have a better guess if you're right.

Thanks to all for the kind words, and I hope we'll have a search system soon!

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: Reinhard
Date: 22 Mar 23 - 03:19 PM

Well done, Bpb!

When I looked through the pages I found a link to Video Instructions in which in the first few seconds the new site balladindex.org was announced as "coming soon". As this video is from June 2020 the move seems to have been planned for some time, so that just the actual timing was forced by the old site being shut down.

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: GUEST,Robert B. Waltz
Date: 22 Mar 23 - 05:23 PM

Reinhard wrote:

When I looked through the pages I found a link to Video Instructions in which in the first few seconds the new site balladindex.org was announced as "coming soon". As this video is from June 2020 the move seems to have been planned for some time, so that just the actual timing was forced by the old site being shut down.

I wish it had been planned for some time. :-) It was more a case of it being suggested and me opening my big mouth in the video. And then forgetting I had even mentioned it. :-) At that point, Dave Engle had either inquired after or acquired the domain name, but that was all that had happened.

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: Joe Offer
Date: 22 Mar 23 - 05:26 PM

That Engle feller, he's a pretty smart cookie. And we're all glad you were able to get the Ballad Index back up so quickly. Thanks to both Bob and David.
Now, what about the other things that were on the Fresno State folklore page, like David's German song index?

-Joe-
Here's the home page of the new Ballad Index:
http://balladindex.org

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: Joe Offer
Date: 14 May 23 - 09:56 PM

And as a result of all this kerfuffle, I found myself appointed to the Board of Directors of the Traditional Ballad Index. I hope I will be able to represent the interests of the Mudcat community.
-Joe-

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 14 May 23 - 09:58 PM

yah!!

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: GUEST,RJM
Date: 15 May 23 - 03:27 AM

Are you well informed about Traditional Ballads?

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: Joe Offer
Date: 15 May 23 - 02:35 PM

Not particularly, RJM, but I'm a good researcher and I'm good at the tech stuff and I know the people and the resources. I rely on others for their expertise, and they rely on mine.

Subject: RE: Traditional Ballad Index 6.5 Released
From: GUEST,Robert B. Waltz
Date: 15 May 23 - 03:15 PM

Joe Offer wrote:

Not particularly, RJM, but I'm a good researcher and I'm good at the tech stuff and I know the people and the resources.

Which is exactly why we asked Joe to be part of the Board.

The technical end of the Ballad Index is basically... me. I make all decisions about what information files with which song, e.g., and I decide which things go in and which go out. That has been the case for the entire almost-thirty-year time the Ballad Index has been in existence; there is no way we could consult a group about every one of hundreds of thousands of versions of tens of thousands of songs!

But there are other decisions to be made ("Is it really necessary to have a Microsoft Word version?"). Soon after I started this project, I assembled a Board of Advisors, and I consulted frequently with the Ballad-L mailing list. But only one of my five original advisors is still around, and the Ballad-L list is much quieter than it used to be. Joe reads much more of Mudcat than I do; he can get a better sense of what people want than I can. And so we asked him to join the Board. And he showed his gratitude by voting down the very first proposal I made after joining the Board. :-p

I should add that this is not an actual corporation; there is no "staff" except me, no compensation (in fact, it's a money pit), and what the Board does is just deal with technical problems (e.g. "They took our site away!" or "The search engine doesn't work") and philosophical issues. We could sure use some younger people. But I take what I get :-). I'm glad to have Joe's perspective.