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How I use this site with my concert finder...

If you haven't seen my concert finder before, then check out:
http://yankovic.org/map/
First you'll see a map with all the locations Al will be hitting for the Straight Outta Lynwood tour. You can enter in your address, city, state, or even just your zipcode and it'll list out the shows by distance for you.

Now, just for kicks, I feel like describing how I use this site to help me maintain the map locations. Hopefully, this might help out anyone else who wants to build something similar or better. I'll write this in multiple posts, mainly because I have a very short attention span.

Part 1: Create a group on Upcoming.org

Part 2: Enter in every concert date, and then associate each one to your group. Yep, this was the most tedious part. I also learned to title each event as "Weird Al at City, ST" so that when you look at the list, it's not just "Weird Al" over and over and over again.

Once that's done, you can check out the group's page and on the right, there's a "Subscribe" button. Click on that and the first link on it will be "Subscribe to RSS feed". In our case, the RSS feed is: http://upcoming.org/syndicate/v2/group/2212/a30053dc45/

This feed provides for me all the info about all FUTURE concerts Al's going to. The venue name, location, date, etc... and here is where it all begins...

to be continued...
Thu 05 Apr 2007 at 09:27 PM

Replies:
Okay, next up... check out this Yahoo Pipe: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=bLotGea62xGfuYYpfOgC8A

You'll see a yahoo map of all the events for this group. How does it work? Click on the "Edit" link at the top to see the inner workings. There's only three modules needed... Fetch Feed, Location Extractor, and the Regex modules.

The Fetch Feed is just that, it'll fetch any RSS. So just plug in the URL above.

The Location Extractor goes through each item in the feed and looks for anything that looks like an address or geographic coordinates, etc... and creates a new entity in each item called "y:location" containing simply a latitude, longitude, and a quality tag of 0-100.

The Regex module does some amazing magic here. I grab certain info like venue name, url, and address and tack them onto the end of the description. Plus, if the geo lat and long is blank to begin with, then I put in the values from y:location.

Then I just output the results and run the pipe. Any pipe that contains geo coordinates automatically get a lovely Yahoo Map. Isn't that convenient? I probably didn't have to make my own concert map. heh
-- Wed 23 May 2007 at 11:06 AM
sigh... well it looks like Upcoming.org changed the RSS so it doesn't list ALL the upcoming shows anymore. So now my map page didn't list ALL of them either. Grrr...

will have to work around it when I get some free time.
-- Thu 26 Jul 2007 at 02:06 PM
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