TMD – Tango Marathon Directory
December 17, 2022· updated January 27, 2024
A directory of events for traveling dancers, with a focus on Tango Marathons, Encuentros, and Milonga Weekends, but also Tango Festivalitos and Festivals. I have been running TMD for 17 years now — started in 2009, and it has outlived several platforms since.
It is realized as a WordPress site with a custom theme and a custom plugin for the data structure — the events are structured data first, prose second. A newsletter goes out via Sendy, driven by a shell script on a schedule, and recent looks at the event data are enhanced using OpenAI’s APIs — the 17-years retrospective was essentially a 1.5-hour exercise with the TMD data, VS Code and GitHub Copilot that kept evolving.
What keeps it alive is the data: years of event editions (including extrapolated “phantom” entries for events that must have happened between recorded editions), city and event-name cleaning, and the occasional analysis of what the numbers say about the marathon scene.