No New Ideas

Over a year ago now, I spent some time playing around with some code to scrape the events pages of local venues and build up an RSS feed of what was on. The idea was that I wouldn’t keep missing gigs. However, I didn’t get it working well enough to release, and haven’t had time to play with it further since.

The other day, I discovered Upcoming.org. Admittedly, it doesn’t do the scraping of existing websites, it relies on the users entering events; but that’s largely to be expected, scraping the websites was the bit I was having most trouble with :-)

The “consuming” events side of things is very cool though - you can see your own events, events being attended by your friends, or events for your area (or Metro, as Upcoming calls them). For example, here’s the page with all the events in Cambridge.

Even better (at least, it is once you’ve gotten into RSS feeds, which you really should…), you can get an RSS feed of events so you don’t have to keep checking the website for new stuff. Or there’s an iCal feed which you can use on a Mac (I think, not having one myself :-) or with a calendar program like Sunbird to have the events show up in your calendar.

The only problem now is getting enough people to start putting events into the Cambridge bit so I find out what’s happening, although I see that Damien has at least been adding the Broken Family Band gigs…