Jump to content
This Site Uses Cookies. If You Want to Disable Cookies, Please See Your Browser Documentation. ×

Out With The New, In With The Old


Helene

Recommended Posts

After over half a decade as "Ballet Talk", we are returning to our original name, "Ballet Alert", named after Arlene Croce's fictional New York City Ballet cast alert phone tree.

Our new board URL is:

www.balletalert.invisionzone.com

Our logo is "red"; hopefully this will distinguish us more visually from Ballet Talk for Dancers. carbro, our patient registrar, fields many registration attempts that are meant for BT4D. A lot of what you see on the screen are actually graphics that will take a bit of effort to change, and we will clash a little bit for a while.

The amazon.com box disappeared from the header at the top of each page next to the logo before this change happened, and I'm working on trying to reinstate it. (The code that amazon.com is providing has changed, which may be the root of the issue.)

I've done some preliminary testing, and so far, old links from emails, bookmarks, and URLs embedded in posts are being redirected to the new URL. I wasn't forced to re-log in after the change.

:clapping: and :flowers: to the kind folks who host our software for making the move as seamless as possible.

I haven't tested everything -- I'll continue to poke -- and if you are having problems or see anomalies, please post them here or send us email via the "Contact Us" link at the top of the page.

Link to comment

Thank you, Helene. I like the font! And thank you very much for handling all those pesky little technical and logistical details so smoothly.

I wanted to add that when I first started Ballet Alert!, I wrote to Arlene Croce to ask her permission, which she graciously, and readily, granted.

Link to comment

Best it's ever looked, although I thought that was an accident with the big red Ballet Alert! one of the disruptions. Much bolder and more impressive. I remember that awful mint-green year or two we had in the old software, although we were all polite about how beautiful it was...this really does look a thousand times better. One of the many reasons this is a better holiday season than usual, esp. for many Americans and New Yorkers.

Link to comment

Well, I remember that column with great glee, and it's wonderful that we'll all be reminded of that wonderful spoof. Maybe someone can post it, from the NY'er website. Of course, when I first read it, I took it seriously, and was SOOOOOO envious of all those people, especially, as she mentioned, the waiters and bartenders at O'Neals' (I hope I'm remembering the name correctly).

Croce deserves (IMHO) one huge monument.

Link to comment

So far, so good. Thanks, all.

Just curious: Why? (Why change the name back to 'Ballet Alert'? Nothing wrong with it but we were chugging along fine as 'Ballet Talk,' no?)

Alexandra and Helene give the practical reason, but I think this has a lot more character as well, coming as it does from something charming from the past (I didn't know about Croce's telephone tree until recently on the 'star system or not' thread.) But 'Ballet Talk' is pretty colorless by comparison, even though, sure, we were doin' all right.

Link to comment

As a someone who has worked as a librarian, I've noticed that periodical name changes cause continuity problems for researchers as well as for occasional readers. The San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum, or PALM which was easy to remember, changed its name to The Museum of Performance & Design and now it's difficult to find the old name linked to the new one - and from other library pages you often get broken links.

For research and citation purposes, for treating your archive as a serious resource, perhaps you should keep the old name somewhere on the title page with the spans of name changes. And design it in someway that Google and Yahoo and the rest will see a natural relation between all the iterations (the old and new Ballet Alert and not-for-dancers Ballet Talk) - and treat them as the same resource and bring up search results on the same page.

Link to comment

Now what happens to the former "Ballet Alert!" site? It contains a lot of useful information.

I have the same inquire. I've accessed that site a lot in the past, and have gathered great info from it.

I don't understand why this would be questioned, actually, which is why I didn't respond. I'm busy enough :)

The Ballet Alert! Site has remained up. I have maintained it since the newsletter with which it was associated ended, and through all these years that this board has been called Ballet Talk. We have now changed the board's name back to....Ballet Alert! What about these facts would raise the question that we'd take down the Ballet Alert!! site? (that's a rhetorical question!)

Quiggin, you're quite right, and I'm hoping that websites are different from publications. Pages seem to be redirecting nicely. I'm sure there will be some misdirections, broken links and dead ends but that will happen when you don't have full-time paid the people, I'm afraid.

Link to comment

I don't know the history of this name thing, but I can't see understand the reason for reverting to an older name... or why it was changed in the first place. I thought Ballet Talk was a fine name as it described what goes on here - "talk" about ballet. The Ballet Alert sounds like it's a warning of some sort. What compelled the name reversion?

If the content doesn't change, the name matters not. However, unless there was a compelling reason to change to the original name, I believe it should have remained as BalletTalk. This reminds me of Blackwater becoming Xe and Verizon from NyNyx and Bell Atlantic. The logo color / banner colors don't do much for me either.

It's water over the dam at this point, but what the heck... since you asked...

Link to comment

It's water over the dam at this point, but what the heck... since you asked...

Actually, we didn't ask :) We asked people to post if they had technical issues or saw anomalies.

That said, we fully expected members to comment about the change, and you have.

Re: the Ballet Alert! site, here's the URL:

http://www.balletalert.com/

The link that Mme. Hermine posted above was from an internet archiving function, the Wayback Machine, not the site itself.

I think Quiggin's point was to be sure that search engines find us when people search for "Ballet Talk". Unfortunately, that search match is what drives so much Ballet Talk for Dancers traffic to our site when they really want BT4D.

Link to comment

This is really odd, because I can't see any amazon box at the bottom of any page on my browser. This has been the case since before the logo and name change.

I've been trying various amazon.com widget code for the last 45 minutes or so, and I haven't seen any code appear on the page. But they've appeared on your page and disappeared after I've removed them from the code.

Link to comment

Bonnette, I know this may sound like a silly question, but do you see an amazon search box next to the logo now?

No, Helene, I just see the Ballet Alert header now; there is a small Amazon search box at the very bottom of the page.

This is what I have right now too, the Amazon search box at the bottom. It looks better than it did earlier when the box looked sort of crowded in at the top, although I wasn't paying much attention. I don't remember an Amazon box at the bottom before, though. It was always at the very top, wasn't it?

Link to comment
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...