About the Site

Toronto Celtic Pages have been around since 1997. They were originally hosted at Geocities, and actively maintained until 1999, then sporadically until 2004. In October 2004, I moved the pages to the current location, which allows me to bring them into the 21st century by allowing me to structure the site in such a way as to allow a more sophisticated interface with less drudgery on my part.

The content presented here comes mostly from the active Celtic music community in and around the Greater Toronto area. I try to post events about music and dance in the area, and I might sometimes post things that are of broader interest, but I generally stick closest to the Irish, Scottish and Cape Breton theme.

Contributing

I add links to other sites from time to time, and here again, I'm most likely to add them if they are directly relevant to the Celtic music scene in Ontario.

I'd love to have reviews, images, links, and general news sent my way. Please send it. I'll use my own judgement on what gets up on the site, and I will edit as I wish, but I will attribute it to you. If you send it, you grant me the right to publish it on this site only. I will generally publish contact information if I have it - I try not to make email addresses too easily harvested by bots

Over the next few months I will be introducing more ways for users of these pages to contribute directly, such as comments and a web form for submitting events. In the mean time, you can contact me at
wil (at) syndesis (dot) com

Web Development and browsers

I've done my best to ensure that these pages are readable by users of standards-compliant browsers (and Internet Explorer as well, since it is inescapable). I test periodicially on Internet Explorer (Windows version 6.0.2, Mac version 5.2), Safari and Firefox. I keep pages as simple as possible consistent with readability, so I can maintain them in a reasonable amount of time. If you have problems with readability or if you are using a browser that is not one of the above list, let me know.

Web development is done on a Macintosh MacBook Pro 15 inch, tested with the built-in Apache web browser and PHP support. I used to use SubEthaEdit to develop the content and CSS stylesheets, but I've since moved to using TextWrangler, a free, fast and complete text editor which has great support for editing sites remotely and securely . I test first on FireFox, which allows me to tweak styles in real time. I'd encourage anybody to check out the free, open-source FireFox browser. It works nicely and consistently on both Macintosh and Windows. It's fast, standards compliant, blocks pop-ups, and renders nicely.

Get Firefox!

About me

I've been in the telecoms industry since 1986. I play fiddle, mandolin and guitar, and usually can be found at the Black Swan session on Thursday nights. I also take photos: you can find them at my Flickr site. My music program Five Line Skink is an editor for the abc music notation language.

Wil Macaulay, November 2004, November 2007