Dodgy backs, Damien Barber and the folk club web sites of south-east England

Originally published in FoT Issue 95: Apr-Jun 2003

First a health warning. Look after your back - it’s your best friend. Don’t sit hunched over your keyboard for hours on end. Back straight, keyboard and mouse within easy reach. Forearms parallel with the ground, knees slightly lower than the hips. And take regular breaks, even if it’s just for five minutes an hour. Ten is better. It’s not just your eyes that can suffer strain, you can do a lot of damage to your spine if your posture is all wrong. Take a look at the posters on the Advanced Seating Designs web site if you want to read more. That is the end of this public service announcement.

One wonders in any case if it is all worthwhile. Imagine how Chris Dalrymple must have felt when he read the following post on the uk.music.folk newsgroup. I should first say that Chris runs the web site for Damien Barber, and had posted an announcement inviting people to have a look. This is what Andrew Wigglesworth had to say about the site.
“IF (please notice the IF) Damien has parted with good money (and hard earned for a folk musician) for this web site, then he should be asking for a refund. IF (please notice the if again) this has been put together by a “professional” then they ought to be ashamed. The code for the web site is a shocking mess, with strange effects on some pages. This is not up to standard... The basic design ideas are good (I do mean that), but you need to have someone run their eye over it to sort out the code, apply a whole raft of nesesary (sic) HTML standards etc.”
Andrew seems to be being careful not to hurt anyone’s feelings, bearing in mind the number of brackets he uses, but hurts them anyway. The web site does admittedly start to do strange things when viewed with the Netscape browser - not with Internet Explorer or Opera though - but “a shocking mess”? I don’t think so. The site is helpful, informative and easy to navigate - a lot more so than many others. There were several more responses to that effect in the newsgroup. What more does Andrew expect? And incidentally the site is maintained for free by Chris “in lunch hours at work”. He admits that the code is bad, but you don’t need to look at the code, just the site, which does largely what was intended, “to give info about Damien and what he’s up to”. No average viewer in his right mind sees the code anyway. He or she wants to read pages, get information, and perhaps be entertained, amused or provoked, and keep his phone bill down. Did I mention that I quite liked the site? (Online update 080208: Chris's site is long gone - Damien and his Demon Barbers can now be found here - I recommend a visit.)

With this in mind I’ve taken a look at several sites belonging to folk clubs in the Sussex area. If my own experience is anything to go by, these will be run by well-intentioned enthusiasts with a little too much spare time on their hands. The Famous Willows meets on Wednesdays in the pavilion at Arundel cricket club and has a good, welcoming site. Each page is relatively small, so is quick to download. The webmaster has taken the trouble to put photos and short biographies of their guests up, though I thought Derek Brimstone had more than an air of Allan Taylor about him, or perhaps he just looks more than good for his age. There is also a page listing the guests over the past five years, which is impressive, though with a little effort could have provided links to the artists’ web sites.

The 6 Bells Folk & Blues Club meets at Chiddingly, near Hailsham. Its web site includes helpful advice for potential floorsingers. It includes the all-important encouragement policy also followed at the Ram: “Don’t worry too much if a song goes wrong, re-start it or abandon it - it won’t be the end of the world. You might be kicking yourself but come along again next time and that time get it right.” A good policy to follow - and I speak from experience. And the site has the eminent good sense to include the Ram’s web site on its links page. Did I mention that I run the Ram Club’s web site? Online update 080208: Not any more, I don't.) The site for Horsham Folk Club sticks more or less to the one page and is little more than a flier - though if that’s its job it does it well. Chichester Folk Song Club meets at The Gribble Inn, Oving. Its site has a bit of information about its residents, but not much else. The Lewes Arms Folk Club has just a guest list and a list of workshops, along with a page of links.

The Wellington, Steyne Road, Seaford, goes into quite a lot of depth on the one page and carries large pictures. The Royal Oak has a good amount of information on guests and the policy of the club, but its pictures are also full-sized, so take a while to load. Far better the approach taken by the Harbour Sessions which meets at Southwick, West Sussex. (Online update 080208: Neither the sire nor the sessions appear to have survived.) It just has thumbnails on the main page, which you can click on to see the bigger picture. Mind you, the information on guests is a bit short, and when I looked there were some broken links to pictures.

The Lamb Folk Club meets on the first and third Wednesday of each month at the Lamb Inn, Old Town, Eastbourne. Or it list it did. I can only guess that it is still running, as if you click on the link to find out what’s on, the programme of events for 2001 is displayed. Which is the problem with web sites, as Damien Barber can tell you, as Mo Bradshaw still has a web site in his name on the web, which still gets picked up by search engines, but is also two years out of date. My thanks to Vic Smith for his Sussex Folk Guide site, which I used for the links to all the pages here. His monthly round-up is invaluable. Text only, a bit harsh on the colouring-in, but all the information you need.

So what have I learned in this trawl through the local area? In short, keep the information up-to-date, and make it quick to download. It’s so easy to persuade your readers to click away to another site if they get fed up waiting for pictures to appear, and you don’t want to give them that opportunity. Make the pics thumbnail - a smaller version - in the first instance, and the punter can click on the thumbnail if they want a better view. If they don’t, you’ve still got their attention. And always set the picture size on your html page, so the text will load into the page around the space without waiting for the picture to download. If you want to see a site which does it all wrong, go to Croydon Folk Club’s site. Everything there is in graphic format, even the text. It takes forever! And the webmaster is a friend of mine. I must have a word with him. (Online update 080208: I did and he ignored me - but since I now have broadband along with the rest of the civilised world (!) the site is fine.)

And did I mention that alcohol is bad for you? Mind you, it makes everything else seem bearable, so perhaps we can leave it be. It’s even quite good for back pain.