toomanydaves…words by davelms

I’ve updated my Leeds Gig Tickets site as I was having some trouble with club nights infiltrating my event aggregation rules – the easiest way around this, I decided, was to farm the nightclub events out to their own page.

So I did.

I now have a Leeds Club Tickets page, with a change of design to differentiate between the varying parts of the ticket websites.

If you’ve not come across these sites before, my aim was to try and make the whole I’m looking to buy gig tickets process easier for the music fan. With many agencies covering the same event, each with their own availability (some sell out far quicker than others) and different fees, I thought it would be better if I could aggregate all 13 or 14 ticket agencies for an event, place the links onto a single webpage, and allow the user to find the ticket links more easily. I then developed software to filter out and remove sold out events and to keep the page fresh.

So think of the site as a specialised ticket search engine. Simples.

So if you’re buying tickets for Leeds gigs, check out our band tickets and nightclub tickets pages.

I’ve recently spent a bit of time creating a more general Leeds site. I started off with the idea of having a portal (-style) front page mixing and matching the best bits of other sites (ahem, legally!) and then creating a web directory of Leeds websites.

Regarding the Web Directory – one of the annoyances I had with DMOZ and hence Google, and Yahoo too, was the fact they are global directories and don’t quite suit all regions. I also found the regional navigation a little difficult. Well, less difficult, more bugging.

Finally, I couldn’t manage to get a domain name of choice, so went for leedz.co.uk ! Zzzzzzzzz… haha.

I’ve been busy lately working on a new design for Leeds Gig Guide. The old site was table-driven, looking a little lame and in dire need of some new features.

I took the Yahoo YUI developers kit and based the whole site on its grid and fonts css implementations. Although obviously I get the blame for the design… *wink*.

The Yahoo Calendar implementation made life a lot easier for the Gig Guide, well, basically because it’s an event guide and hence primarily date oriented. Date selection was handled by a javascript request (using Yahoo Connection) to a PHP/MySQL backend which retrieves the gigs for that date and displays the back.

And I got to play a little with Flickr too for some band-related imagery.

• www.leedsgigs.co.uk

I’ve done this kind of thing in the past *, and it’s very easy! But, shame on me, I forgot… ooops. Basically, all I wanted to do was take an existing image and use PHP to write text (dynamic, created by my script) over the top and return the updated image to the browser.

(* I created a last.fm / audioscrobbler script that picked up my latest tracks from their feeds, created an image from it, and displayed in my forum signatures. This was before the days that last.fm did this kind of thing themselves!! Bit redundant now though.)

Aaaaanyway… simple really, here’s what I did.

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As part of the Leeds Music Scene website I’ve been working on the events section a little recently. Promoters, venue owners and bands submit their listings over at another site I run (Leeds Gig Guide) and these are then made available to the LMS site where I have band profiles, venue details, etc. The two complement each other nicely.

Each gig now has its own page on the LMS site and I can incorporate a variety of useful bits of information into it, such as venue location (using the Google Maps API) and ticket links.

My next project was to add an “Add To Calendar” option.

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