UnorthodoxY Archive It's wasn't what you thought

I don’t go to gigs much, not because I don’t want to but because I never know they’re on until too late. I was reminded of this on my way to work this morning when I saw a poster for a Regina Spektor (iTunes) gig at Cabaret Voltaire. Sadly the gig is tonight, and I’m already busy, and it’s sold out. I’m not too depressed as I saw her in the festival, and I’m sure she’ll be back again but I resolved that I should try and be better informed about upcoming gigs.

Now I do occasionally get e-mails with upcoming gigs, but they get spam binned, or I forget, or miss the choice local gig in the middle of all the list of naff national ones.

What I need, I figured, is a RSS feed for gigs in Edinburgh, or even Scotland. So the rest of my short saunter into work consisted of wondering if I could knock up such a thing by automatically scraping the Ticketmaster site or something. But no need, it’s been done. A brief search turned up gigs.co.uk which has gigs by area and, wonderfully, an RSS feed for each page. Here’s the Scotland ‘All Music’ feed which I’m now using to keep a eye on what’s upcoming.

Of course that’s a fairly broad search, ideally you’d have a better filter so you get results you’re interested in. There’s probably other feeds out there that do similar things too.

Even more impressive would be to go a stage further and tailor the feed to know where you’re going to be on certain days. I’m going on holiday in a few weeks so the feed could automatically exclude gigs from Scotland for those days and add in gigs from a feed for Prague instead.

I think one of the areas we’ll see websites working on is using RSS for a wider variety of things, which in turn will lead application developers to find ways of combining different RSS feeds to provide useful applications. Now if I can come up with something useful before anyone else …