Festivalsero.com blog

Online ticket sales environment at Festivalsero.com

2010-10-30T08:20:00.000-07:00

Finally there is possibility to buy international salsa festivals passes online with credit card or paypal. We have implemented an online salsa festivals ticket sales feature on Festivalsero.

It is usually quite hard to get tickets to salsa festivals in another country, sometimes even in your own country. We want to make it easy for salsa fans to obtain passes to all the great salsa events around the globe. We have started out with a few festivals, like Salsa Sunrise International Fair and Leuven Salsa Festival 8 in november. Don´t be afraid to try out the new online ticket system. Another positive thing is that online you can get your salsa full passes cheaper, we are always trying to get good deals for our users!

If you are a festival organiser and want to make your tickets available online to salsa lovers all over the world, then contact us at info@festivalsero.com. We are prompt to answer and get your event tickets online sales in a few days. Lets make it easier to everyone - Festivalsero.com.

Put a list of events on your homepage - updated!

2010-09-17T00:32:00.000-07:00

We've updated our Embeddable Salsa and other Latin dances festivals list - now you can filter, which dance styles you would like to appear in your embedded list. The choice is among 10 of our most popular styles: Mixed styles salsa, Argentine Tango, Cuban Salsa, Swing, Bachata, Lindy Hop, Zouk, Rueda de Casino, Mambo NYon2 and West Coast Swing.

The other options remain the same, of course - you can still filter either by continent, or by list of countries.

So you can now have a simple list of Bachata festivals in US, or a bit more complicated Lindy Hop and West Coast Swing festivals in UK, Spain and France, or whatever combination of styles and geographic area you like!

You're welcome to try it out and put it on your dance related website.

The stars of the salsa world

2010-07-06T04:20:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since last post, but we've been like busy little bees bringing out new exciting features for your browsing pleasure.

Guess who are the most important people in the world of salsa? You of course - the huge number of dancers that just by participating and having fun make every party and every festival, no matter where in the World. But there's another group of people who are there to help you to make most out of any event - the Artists. Without a further due, the Festivalsero.com is proud to bring to you our brand new Artists feature!

On every event page, you can now click on name of your favorite artist, and see the Youtube videos of them performing, plus list of the styles they teach. The pages get updated as we gather more information on the artists of the salsa world.

Check out the cool performance by Anne & Anichi that we found!

Also, as most Salsa festivals take place annually, now you can find links to previous and next editions of the events with some historical data. This also gets updated more as we improve our databases.

Another draw for Dias Cubanos

2010-06-02T22:35:00.000-07:00

Festivalsero.com is drawing another winner to recieve a FREE FULL PASS to Dias Cubanos 2010 salsa festival in the Netherlands (26-27. June). Everyone who wishes to take part in the draw, just click "Like" on Festivalsero.com status in Facebook. Prize will be drawn on the 5th of June. Be fast!

Whole new home page

2010-05-09T12:59:00.000-07:00

We've replaced ye ol' static text on our home page with some really cool features!

The "Upcoming events" shows events that start within next ten days, and the major events are laid out first. I guess the "Major events by dance style" is pretty self explanatory. ;-)

Also, if you browse the style's section, you'll see, that some of the festivals are marked in bold. That means, that these events are dedicated for this specific dance style. For example, International Bachata Festival Bachaturo is marked bold in Bachata events section of the site.

Oh, and click "Like" any of our pages, to share the Festivalsero goodness with your friends in Facebook! The button is in are in the lower part of all pages.

Any Ideas, questions, problems, praise you would like to share about Festivalsero is absolutely welcome - the feedback button can be accessed from our home page.

Event search, feedback and 2 free full passes

2010-04-30T16:22:00.000-07:00

We've just installed our newest "Search festivals..." feature on beta.festivalsero.com. It's the small box in top right corner - looks simple outside, but is indeed clever inside. It can find your event by either festival name, city or country.

We also have now a feedback box on our home page, so if you feel like expressing your feelings about Festivalsero, or just give an idea or suggestion - you are more than welcome to do so. We're here for you, so all ideas will be taken into account. We've put it on front page only, so you'll know where to look.

We're playing with these updates currently in our sandbox, but once we're confident they work fine, we'll put them also to Festivalsero's main page. You are welcome to try them out also on beta site though!

Oh, and don't forget to join our Facebook page to participate in a draw for the cool Dias Cubanos event 2 full passes!

New design & more

2010-04-16T03:00:00.000-07:00

Last night, we went live with our new design. The new design is more compact, and has more professional look than our old, homegrown layout. I hope you like it!

But we've also added a new cool feature! We've removed the huge list of all events - the continents, regions, and countries, and dance styles now have their own, dedicated pages, where the appropriate events are listed. For example, to keep up to date with Salsa festivals in Spain, all you have to do, is to go to the page, and bookmark the exact page. Easiest way to bookmark are the "Share this!" buttons that we've added at the bottom of each page. Or if you prefer, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed or add events directly to your calendar.

Same goes for different dance style pages, so here are the example the links for Rueda de Casino events around the World , its RSS and iCalendar.

We've added spaces for featured events in right column, so if you'd like your event to have extra exposure at Festivalsero.com, please contact us.

Tailor's last measurements..

2010-04-08T06:58:00.000-07:00

We at Festivalsero.com are excitedly getting ready to pull on our brand new designer suit. The site is about to get a new design, plus some exciting new enchancements and features (I will write more about these in couple of days)!

To get a sneak peek at our new layout, see here: http://beta.festivalsero.com

The Beta site will be available also later, so whenever you feel curious, just take a look to see what's cooking!

Oh, and to be first to know when new features come online - make sure you become our Fan in Facebook.

Service outage last night

2010-04-05T23:26:00.000-07:00

Our servers were down today for several hours, and service was unavailable. This was caused by database server malfunction on our hosting partner's server farm. The problem is now fixed and we will take measures to avoid service unavailability in the future for similar reasons.

We are extremely sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused!

Dance styles - now with videos

2010-03-23T00:31:00.000-07:00

There are events from more than 50 different latin dance styles featured on Festivalsero.com, so for someone just discovering the latin dances, it can become a bit overwhelming.
To help you out navigating in the abundant variety of different latin dance styles, we've handpicked sample videos from the masters of each dance style, and also added the style description.

We haven't limited the videos only to world known names - being dancers ourselves, we know that sometimes the most amazing talent can be seen in a club in a barrio in Santiago de Cuba or San Juan or Medellin.

Check out the video of couple dancing Colombian Style Salsa and you'll know what I mean. :-)

New feature: Dance styles

2010-03-11T03:05:00.000-08:00

Looking for a cool kizomba event? Are you a mambo ace? Or maybe your passion is Bachata?
We've made your searching easier - Festivalsero.com is introducing a new feature - browse events by the dance style. Choose your favourite style from the tag cloud, and get a list of congresses, festivals and other events that feature this dance style.

World salsa events map updated

2010-03-02T16:31:00.000-08:00

Our unique world salsa events map just got an update - with 200+ salsa events on the map, it had become cluttered and not very comfortable to use.

Now, we've clustered the salsa events together, so that the map looks tidier and gives you a better overview of what's going on in salsa hotspots around the globe.

200+ upcoming salsa events!

2010-02-28T04:24:00.000-08:00

"The past is a good place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." - Unknown

Today, for the first time, we broke the magical border of 200 upcoming and updated salsa congresses, festivals and weekenders on our site!

That makes and average of 4 events/week in all continents (besides Antarctica, as the penguins apparently don't appreciate salsa ;-) 59 countries and 163 cities! This makes us the definitive salsa events information source, and believe us - we've checked!

Of course, the number always changes, as the time goes by but unlike many other salsa information sites, on festivalsero.com, you will find the list always up-to date - the upcoming festivals come first!

If you want to keep your readers updated, but can't be bothered by updating the list on your site, then grab our embeddable salsa festivals list, and put it on your site for free.
Or just subscribe to our Salsa Events RSS or Salsa Events iCalendar feeds.

PS. We are also working on our festivals archive, as well as other exciting features, so check back soon!

A list of salsa festivals for your homepage

2010-02-13T16:57:00.000-08:00

While looking for a fun salsa event to visit, I found, that while many salsa websites offer a list of international salsa festivals, most of the pages are unfortunately outdated. It is the year 2010, and I only managed to find a few sites that had some events from the current year.

So, to help to fix that - we're proud to announce our ever updated, embeddable salsa festivals list, that anyone can put freely on their homepage. Let us deal with updating the information so that you can concentrate on what is important to you - organize your festival, or run your salsa school. Just copy the snippet and paste it into the HTML of your website, and you're set! If you need, you can twiddle the height, width and other bits to make the list fit your page best.

It gets even better - you can personalize the list! If worldwide festivals list gets too long for your site, you can choose just one continent.

If just a number of countries interest your websites audience, you can even pick individual countries, and the list only displays events in those countries. For example, by entering "fi,ca,tr" you'll get a personalized list of upcoming salsa festivals in Finland, Canada and Turkey. Cool!

You can also use our Festivalsero.com iGoogle gadget to add our World Salsa Festivals list to your iGoogle homepage or webpage.

Salsa event iCalendar and RSS feeds

2010-02-06T07:21:00.000-08:00

We started publishing our iCalendar and RSS feeds of the world salsa events today.

That means, that from now on, you can have the up-to-date events show right in your favourite RSS reader application (such as Google Reader: ), and whenever we add an event to our database, it'll show right up in your reader!

The same goes for the iCalendar - just fire up your calendar application (such as Apple's iCal or Microsoft Outlook, import our ics feed, and voila!

The addresses of our worldwide salsa event feeds are:
RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Festivalsero
iCalendar feed: http://www.festivalsero.com/ics/

You can also see the calendar view on the "Browse festivals by month" section of the site.

The worlds 1st: Salsa Events World Map

2010-01-28T09:54:00.001-08:00

We're proud to announce - Festivalsero.com now features the World's First Salsa Festivals World Map!

You can zoom in, and see the hotspots of world salsa. As expected, the biggest concentration of the events appear in Europe and North America, but Asia and Oceania (Hong Kong Salsa Festival and Sydney Salsa Congress among others) have some of the worlds greatest salsa events too.

The Tromso International Salsa Congress can rightfully claim the World's Northernmost Salsa Festival title.

Let the exploration begin!

Browse salsa events in tag clouds

2010-01-26T09:30:00.000-08:00

We've introduced a new fun way to browse the salsa events database - pleased to introduce: the Festivalsero tag clouds.

It's pretty straight-forward to use - the bigger the item in the cloud, the more events there are. Just hover the mouse cursor over the item you can see how many events there are in our database, and click to skip to the festivals list.

Currently, there are 4 clouds - continents, regions, countries, and months.

Happy browsing!

Welcome, Festivalsero!

2010-01-25T13:21:00.000-08:00

Being passionate salsa dancers, a year ago we were looking for a fun salsa event to go, but found, that (although many salsa events do have a website) there is no reliable, up-to-date site, where salsa world events would be covered.

Most sites either

have been updated months (or years) ago
promote only one specific event or events by specific artist
have only local events coverage and in local language

So here we are. Festivalsero.com aims to be an independent, always up-to-date and worldwide salsa portal, where all salsa enthusiasts can check out where to go next! Our first language is English, but soon the Español, Deutsch, Italiano, Русский & other languages will follow.

Festivalsero? It's a mix of two words that we coined - "festivals" + "salsero". This site is for festivalseros - salsa dancers who like to party and learn the dance with the best salsa artists at salsa festivals, congresses and other events all around the world.

Prefer bachata, kizomba or other related latin dance? We've thought about you too. The Bachata festivals are listed, and many bigger events do have other workshops. Just browse the list of event's, and you'll find something for you - we promise.

This is our blog. We'll be posting here the information about our portal.
Check back soon to discover exiting new features! Or better yet - subscribe to our blog feed.

If we've overlooked your event, we're sorry and just let us know: festivals@festivalsero.com
We're more than happy to add any event that is open for international salseros/salseras.

Dance like no-one is watching.

Yours,
Fez Salsero