New site: The ATX

December 18th, 2005

It’s been a long time since I’ve built a website. With work and school going on, I really don’t have the time to screw around with pet projects. With finals wrapping up 2 weeks ago, it really gave me a chance to work on some ideas rattling around in my head.

First and foremost, an entertainment guide. I live in the fine fine city of Austin, Texas. And from time to time, my wife and I do like to hit the town — catch a movie, watch a live music show, or take in a sporting event. Problem is, I don’t always know what’s going on when I make that decision to go out. It’d be nice to get a very quick run down of the things going on that night that I might like. If something looks good, then I’ll set plans in motion. If not, that’s cool too – less money to pay the babysitter.

The key for me was to build something simple. A site that not only shows what’s going on today, but also is clean and easy to read. It’s not rocket science…just list events that don’t suck. What’s playing at the Alamo, who’s headlining at Antone’s, which teams are in town.

Of course, I can’t pull this information out of thin air. I have to rely on major entertainment sites to tell me what’s going on. And I certainly can’t report everything from their sites word for word – that would not be cool. What I do want to do, however, is use that information as a starting point. As in, how would I use that information to plan my night? Say I wanted to go to the Alamo Drafthouse downtown, and felt like taking in some live music later that night. Who’s playing nearby? That’s the kind of information I need to know.

For me, the best way to present this stuff would be in the form of a map. Seems like that’s the latest trend these days. (Ultimately, I went with Yahoo Maps – I’ve found their API to be more developer-friendly than Google’s.)

Enough nerd spout. Without further ado, my entertainment guide for Austin, Texas:

A quick rundown of the guides:

• Locations of live music clubs, with Austin Chronicle listings
• Locations of Alamo Drafthouse theaters, with showtimes via Austin 360
• Locations of sports home games
• Weather guide – overkill!
• RSS feeds for everything (I’m big on RSS) – axed b/c it’s verbatim from the Chronicle website (not cool by my standards)

I plan on getting lots of use out of the site, and I hope others do. I’m big on simple. (Who isn’t these days) As usual, I’m going to keep comments open for people to give some feedback.

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