So what's Salsaboston.com all about?

Well, allow me to explain...!

Salsaboston.com all started innocently enough as a text file I compiled about where to go Salsa dancing.  I had just picked up Latin dancing as a new hobby sometime in 1997 or so, I forget exactly. Soon I found myself emailing my info friends who were interested--or moreover that I wanted to get interested since I was hooked!  Finally it got so crazy trying to email this stuff all the time, especially when people started asking me for it,  so  I decided to try out web programming one day. This was the early days of the web, keep in mind. So it al turned it into a web page to simplify life. Hah...! Soon it was linked to from all over the place and listing info and inquiries come in pretty much daily. That was cool! Keep it coming, but please keep in mind that this page is a public service, both to disperse information to the local dancers and a place for the promoters to advertise what's up.  I don't get paid for maintaining it. However, if you go to a club, concert, class, etc. that you learned about through my page, please let the the club or instructor, etc. know that you saw it here.

In May, 1999, I finally acquired the domain "salsaboston.com" to move the site away from my MIT internet access, given the traffic the site started getting.   While I hadn't really explored salsaweb.com, the greatest international Salsa dancing web site on the net (founded by--now friend--Edie Lewis ("The SalsaFreak") and a whole bunch of other neat people) it turned out coincidentally that my site had developed into something very similar but on a local/regional level. Since it was a good match, Edie appointed me part of the family by making me the Boston correspondent to the cityguides section. Check it out if you're traveling!

I started logging hits in May, 1998, and my old page at MIT reached a steady 1000 visits per month (whoa!, but were you surfing in 1999?).  When salsaboston.com was launched, that jumped quickly to 1500-2000 visitors per month, and I started using web develpment software instead of hand coding....  By the summer of 2000, the site was getting 5000 visitors per month and 15,000 page views.  Yeaowh!  (The site is now hosted by a great people at http://itxdesign.com.  If you're looking for web hosting, drop Paul a note and tell him I sent you.)

So, nowdays the purpose of the site is to create salsa dancers and to put Boston on the international Salsa dancing MAP!  (Update 2005: In fact, I think we've done that!) To make this happen, I'm looking for content contributors!  If you would like to write some articles on the Boston scene, your experiences, local Salsa personalities, club reviews, ideas, etc. etc. etc., please drop me a line.

Sometime around 2000 SalsaBoston Entertainment was created, as a spin-off of the website. I and a few friends decided we'd open a Salsa Night at the now defunct Sophia's Nightclub. The night became a mainstay night over the next six months, and the SalsaBoston team grew. Eventually we started doing not just Salsa nights, but lessons, the harbor cruises, annually the Boston Salsa Congress™, and generally trying to have a good time! Join us!

...and who's this Olaf guy anyway?!!

Someone told me the other [year...] they met someone "who knew of me", someone who had danced locally a lot but never met me.  In fact, she and her friends wondered if I even existed... or if I was perhaps some sort of marketing consortium or something (kind of like Shakespeare).  Well, I'M REAL and here you have it! A picture of me dipping my dance partner Anja at the beach at the Curacao Salsa Tour 2000!

I'm American born, a pure gringo (maybe Viking blood or something northern European), German family, grew up in Colorado and Miami, but I started Latin dancing in Boston long after I left Miami to attend MIT.   In my working life in case you're wondering, I'm a consulting engineer in and around MIT and I live in Admiral's Hill, Chelsea.

Please enjoy my site, send me information and comments, feel free to add links to it in your own pages (please let me know if you do), and see you at the clubs!