MixedContent

With around 1600 bands playing at SXSW, planning your time is critical. With the inevitable slipping of gig schedules, knowing who else is playing at a given venue is really important, and so I threw together this tool to help myself plan my evenings entertainment. You might also find it helpful:

http://sxsw.mixedcontent.com/

I screen scraped the SXSW site, plotted the venue data on a map and then scrapped artist MP3s from the SXSW site, and hooked those into the new Yahoo Media Player. The end result is you can click on a venue marker, and then listen to the bands that are playing there that evening.

It was also interesting in how long each part of this app took to build:

• Using Ruby and the totally awesome hpricot HTML parser to write the screen scraper to grab HTML from sxsw.com and convert data to JSON - 20 minutes
• Writing the JS to show the JSON data on the map - 1 hour
• Fussing with CSS and HTML layout (which is still broken!) - 3+ hours!

Moral of the story - Either learn more CSS, or surround myself with talented developers and designers so I don’t have to. I’m inclined to do the later…

Next up is to incorporate this data into Rilli so it’s possible to build your own calendar and see where your friends are going.

Thanks to Jeremy Keith for inspiration, and Mike Purvis for some Map code.

UPDATE: Now working in IE7. Thanks to Lucas for the bug report.

UPDATE 2: A few folks have asked for the data I’ve scraped from the SXSW site. The (huge) JSON file can be found here. Go nuts…