Ross Grady<p>TL;DR: If you live in the <a class="hashtag" href="https://dood.net/tag/triangle" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Triangle</a> area of NC and you are interested in live music: </p><p><a href="http://roks.me" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://roks.me</a> </p><p>So: For ~22 years or so I ran a website called <a href="http://trianglerock.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">trianglerock.com</a> which aggregated show listings for venues around central NC (primarily <a class="hashtag" href="https://dood.net/tag/raleigh" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Raleigh</a>, <a class="hashtag" href="https://dood.net/tag/durham" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Durham</a>, <a class="hashtag" href="https://dood.net/tag/chapelhill" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#ChapelHill</a>).</p><p>It started out entirely manually assembled, and I gradually automated portions of it. But for ~reasons~, namely: </p><ul><li>I intentionally wanted each band/artist, and each venue, to be an entity in a database, so that it could be searchable later (via a search interface I never finished building)</li><li>I was a completist & that meant seeking out show listings in social media & other non-scrape-able places</li><li>I didn’t list everything, and for shows I personally cared about, I included some preview verbiage I wrote myself</li></ul><p>it always required a few hours a week of manual labor. </p><p>When the pandemic hit & all the venues shut down, I sort of belatedly reached the conclusion that I was tired of spending a few hours a week on it . . . so I never started it back up again after venues started re-opening.</p><p>(I also don’t go out to many rockclub shows anymore, because too many of the rockclubs around here (with a handful of exceptions, thank you, you know who you are) are depressing black-painted concrete-floored boxes with zero character, disgusting bathrooms, and noplace to sit.)</p><p>A few times over the past few years, people have mentioned to me that they missed the site (including multiple venue owners / bookers / promoters) but my careabout number remained super-low.</p><p>A couple of weeks ago, though, I was at a show, seeing an amazing band from Toronto called The Weather Station, and chatting with a few old friends. Two topics came up multiple times:</p><ul><li>our mutual surprise that there weren’t more people there</li><li>my old friends’ characterization of me, when introducing me to their kids / partners, as “umm, how do I explain Ross? Well, he used to run this website . . . “</li></ul><p>Partly I was like “dude I am standing RIGHT HERE you don’t have to past-tense me like that” but also in talking to them they did genuinely bemoan the difficulty in keeping track of shows since I quit.</p><p>I <em>still</em> don’t want to spend any significant amount of time collating show listings. </p><p>But nearly all the venue websites these days are using some kind of WordPress plugin or other framework that generates predictably-structured HTML. I had already written parsers for a few of them back in ~2018 or so . . . so it wasn’t much effort at all to expand my parser collection.</p><p>The result is a minimal static site that is just a date-sorted aggregation of all the listings I can scrape: <a href="http://roks.me" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://roks.me</a></p><p>(Yeah, http – I don’t feel like doing even the minimal LetsEncrypt dance here, and if ppl are worried that a static html site is too risky to load via http then they probably aren’t leaving their houses to go to rock clubs either.)</p><p>One thing that amused me & also made me feel old was realizing that ~5 years off the local-music beat also means that I couldn’t write blurbs about most of these shows even if I wanted to, not without doing a LOT of research . . . and I’m not particularly interested in diving back into the world of one million indie-rock and garage bands who are all great people and write decent songs but are also, ahem, very similar to 7000 other indie-rock and garage bands I have personally seen over the past 40 years of going to shows.</p>