Oakland Tonight
I recently moved from Washington DC to Oakland, California. To help get to know the area better, I decided to create oakland-tonight, a simple site for tracking upcoming shows and other events around Oakland.
The original concept was created by @tmcw in the form of dctn, a nightly event scraper for DC. I liked the simplicity of the idea: instead of showing a packed calendar full of events, dctn displayed only events happening that evening. @drdemsyn built on this idea with chs-tonight -- an event scraper for Charleston, South Carolina -- with the addition of weekly event summaries for those who would benefit from a little bit of planning ahead. oakland-tonight is mostly a fork of chs-tonight.
How it Works
Similar to dctn, and even more similar to chs-tonight, oakland-tonight uses a mix of cron, node.js, and Github Pages. A node script is periodically run that dynamically loads and runs a set of source modules; scrapers that parse structured show data from unstructured venue website calendars. This source data is then used to generate a new version of the static site, and the result is pushed to Github. This architecture works well, because the scraper can do the slowish downloading once in a while on a tiny server, while serving the static site stays lightning fast and robust with no effort on my part.
Venues
Thirteen venues are being tracked to start, but around a dozen more are planned. Most are music oriented, but I made an effort to include venues with less of a booze+music focus as well.
- The Fox Theater
- Comedy Oakland
- Freight & Salvage
- The Golden Bull
- The Legionnaire Saloon
- Oakland Museum of California
- The New Parish
- The Night Light
- The Octopus Literary Salon
- Oracle Arena
- Starry Plough
- SudoRoom
- Yoshi's
The main limiting factor here is my knowledge of the lesser known venues around town (still exploring!), and the overall awful quality of many of the smaller venue's websites. A robust text summarizer and metadata extractor that works with unstructured content will be necessary to hit the long tail of indie venues.
If you want to report a bug, request a feature, or add a new venue let me know on Github or on twitter @morganherlocker.
2-4-16