TL;DR: If you live in the #Triangle area of NC and you are interested in live music:

http://roks.me

So: For ~22 years or so I ran a website called trianglerock.com which aggregated show listings for venues around central NC (primarily #Raleigh, #Durham, #ChapelHill).

It started out entirely manually assembled, and I gradually automated portions of it. But for ~reasons~, namely:

• 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)
• I was a completist & that meant seeking out show listings in social media & other non-scrape-able places
• I didn’t list everything, and for shows I personally cared about, I included some preview verbiage I wrote myself

it always required a few hours a week of manual labor.

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.

(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.)

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.

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:

• our mutual surprise that there weren’t more people there
• 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 . . . “

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.

I still don’t want to spend any significant amount of time collating show listings.

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.

The result is a minimal static site that is just a date-sorted aggregation of all the listings I can scrape: http://roks.me

(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.)

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.