Live Local Music

Inspiration

When traveling to a new city it's tough to know where to go get a feel for local music and local flavor. There are websites that catalog music events in SF, and some websites announcement big concerts, but no applications give users a geographic (map) representation of where there are local music venues nearby. This would be useful for people who are not familiar with the city, don't know where different music venues are located, and simply want to just find a local haunt down the street with some live music.

What it does

This website scrapes the web for music events taking place tonight and displays all of that information in map form. That way, a tourist with little appreciation for where things are located in the city can simply look at the map, find where they are, and find a good place a few steps down the road with live music.

How I built it

This website uses nokogiri and Ruby on Rails to search the web for local events. Then, the application looks at information stored on each of the pages and seeds a database with information about venue locations, times, descriptions, etc. The app uses a geocoder gem linked to a Google API that encodes the latitude and longitude of a locale's position based on address. With that information, the open source MapBox API uses the latitude/longitude information stored for each music event object and geolocates that object on a map for the user to interact with.

Challenges I ran into

We exceeded the GoogleAPI's query limit, which inhibited our ability to successfully seed our database and continue with testing. This was the most significant challenge because it took us some time to figure out why our database was no longer seeding with the correct information. We experienced other smaller bugs along the way, but none too significant.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We learned how to use map APIs, Rails, nokogiri and geolocators, and expanded our work with JavaScript and HTML5/CSS, all relatively new features for our group members. The group worked extremely well together.