Feature creep is a dangerous thing, so put on your safety goggles and keep your hands and arms inside of the web site at all times.

The abridged story so far...

• .April 18th, 2000 - AtTheFaire.com officially launched.
• January 1st, 2001 - Site completely redesigned with many new sections added.
• April 1st, 2001 - AtTheFaire becomes "@THEFAIRE" in an April Fool's joke.
• August 6th, 2001 - John-Paul writes an article about the future.

Some amazing things are in store for AtTheFaire over the next year. In my current Webmaster Musings article I explain some of the obstacles that may stand in the way of expanding the site, but in this article I want to share with you what we have been working on lately and what we plan to be working on in the (near?) future.

Putting the past behind us.

In typical John-Paul style, I'll begin out talk of the future by explaining some of the things we have done in the recent past. First, we implemented a new automated system for posting news items and announcements to our front page. The script, called Coranto, lets us easily submit items and have them display instantly without us ever having to manually edit a page and reupload it to the server. This has already saved us a bunch of time and, as you can see, it has let us alter the appearance of our main page and make it look (hopefully) much spiffier.

Coranto also supports add-ons (think "plug ins") to expand its capabilities. Our first add-on is called "zcomment" and this script is responsible for all those (add a comment) links you see by news postings. Now anyone can add their two cents to any news posting without having to enter into our message board.

The next major add-on to be installed will be an e-mail system. You will be able to get an e-mail every time we post a news announcement, or set a time frame to receive updates. For instance, you could get one e-mail that lists all the news items we have posted in the past week. We might be able to completely replace our Yahoo! group once this is installed, so keep watching our front page for the latest news.

I see the script has arrived.

Switching gears completely, I first learned to program in BASIC on a TRS-80 computer at Radio Shack back in 1982. Since then I've used a variety of systems and learned to program in a variety of computer languages. In fact, my first business was a company called Sub-Etha Software which produced games, utilities and applications from 1990 until I moved to Iowa in 1995. After losing my job recently I decided it might be time to brush up on my programming skills and see if I could learn some new tricks. I decided to look into programming CGI (common gateway interface) scripts for use on web sites.

After working through an online PERL programming language tutorial I wrote my first CGI script -- a "users online" counter. You will see this script on our front page where it displays the number of visitors we have had within the past five minutes.

I also worked on a simple "guess the number" game and then created a "quote of the moment" script that lets visitors add a one line message which will be randomly shown on the main page. Fun stuff!

As you can see, there is a lot of new development going on here. The scripts, being custom-written, can be made to do exactly what we want. In the future I plan to roll out a "login" system to let you customize the site a bit -- maybe it will show the number of days until just the festivals you plan to go to. Perhaps we'll add a way for you to leave instant messages to other AtTheFaire visitors (without having to use the messenger built into our message board). It's going to be interesting to see what we come up with over the next few weeks (and months).

A real find.

Our search engine is currently very simple. If you want to find a merchant that sells leather, you could type in "leather" and see what shows up. You would then be presented with a listing of every page that has that word on it. It would be nice to have a searchable database of merchants or performers and that is what we want to add. By making our Faire Folke section database driven it will also save us much work when it comes time to update or add entries.

A fair faire list.

The last thing the world needs is another Internet index of renaissance festival sites, and that is just what we want to create. Hopefully we can work with the other sites and use their data (to avoid replicating a lot of work that has already been done). Why do this, you ask? There are a few problems with the current index sites. First, they are very static in nature. While you can scan for events by name, date, or location, we think it would be nice to find events based on travel time from your home.

Imagine being able to view all festivals within a 2 hour drive! Imagine how many new events you might be able to learn about this way. For instance, there are several out of state events near us that we'd never considered looking for because we assumed they would be too far away.

By automating the database we could also allow event organizers to update their own information in real time. Today, a submission might take a day or a week before the changes are published.

Lastly, we'd like to offer a way to be notified anytime a new event is added that meets your criteria (distance, state, theme) and also e-mail you when things change with events you have decided to monitor.

All of these are fairly simply features, but none of the festival indexes currently offer them. If they see this article then implement any of this, that just means we don't have to do as much work (and, frankly, I'd love to see them do this rather than us have to become "yet another" faire index site).

A community effort.

Rennies seem to have a bond when they meet, and we'd like to generate some of that community spirit on this web site. Our message board is a good first step, but we'd like to add things like a chat room and messaging service to let folks exchange ideas and comments. As mentioned earlier, the news posting comment system lets site visitors chime in on any of our postings but we'd like to expand this idea to let you leave messages to each other, have live chats, and just generally emulate a festival atmosphere through the web site.

By adding more online movies and audio files we can being some of the sensory experiences of a festival to this site. Could a virtual merchant market be that far off? Wait and see...

Now what?

There is no timeline for these updates. Some of them will happen as soon as we have the money to invest in new software tools, while others are still in the "how in the world are we going to pull this off" planning stage.

Stay tuned. AtTheFaire.com version 3.0 is going to be a good thing.

-- John-Paul

Help keep us online. Book your travel here, or patronize some of these folke:

1. Des Moines Ren Faire (IA)
2. Iowa Ren Festival (IA)
3. Iowa-Minnesota Pirate Fest (IA)
4. Greater Quad Cities Ren Faire (IL)
5. Midlands Pirate Festival (NE)
6. Nebraska Ren Faire (NE)
7. Ren Faire at Sleepy Hollow (IA)

1. thescotsdragon.com
2. threegryphons.com

1. danzamystique.com
2. gypsycomedyshow.com
3. mydragonstories
4. phoenixswords.atthefaire.com
5. piratecomedyshow.com
6. queenbea.atthefaire.com
7. revelers.atthefaire.com
8. wenchville.com

1. anothercrappypodcast.com
2. atthefaire.com
3. crocolyle.atthefaire.com
4. perin.atthefaire.com
5. renbanner.net
6. renreporter.com
7. sirclisto.com

Host your site with ATF and be listed here! $50/year (and the publicity is free!)

Permanent festivals in our area: Kansas City Renaissance Festival, Bristol Renaissance Faire, Des Moines Renaissance Faire and Minnesota Renaissance Festival.
Other ATF sites: DisneyFans.com DMHauntedHouses.com