And now on to the most exciting new feature! Previously there were two ways to explore events - by day and by recently added. Now there's a new way to find events that is really exciting, useful and currently does not exist on the regular website - find current events near you. There is a simple form to enter your location and hit "search" to get results. "Your location" can be as specific as a street address or as general as a zip code (or even city). You will then see a list of all the venues within 2 miles of the original location along with any current events for each. You can click on a venue name to see more info about that venue, click on an event to learn more about that specific event and there is a button at the bottom to get the next set of closest results.

It's all a little rough and there's not much control over the search parameters or results display, but I didn't think all that was necessary right now. I'd like to live with it for a while and see how it feels and hear what other people think about it. This is another one of those ideas I thought about when first starting the site over a year ago, but never knew if I would get to or be able to figure out of my own so this is a particularly exciting update. I have also been thinking about a bigger update to the map options and display on the regular site which could now also include a proximity search as part of it.

Try it out and see if it works for you. Have any ideas or suggestion? Use the contact form. Then tell your friends about the best arts events calendar in SF... Boo-yah!

There are many CAPTCHA services available, but the one I chose is kind of interesting. It is called reCAPTCHA and it is a free service that helps digitize books, newspapers and old radio shows. The test presents a known word and an unknown word from a scan of an old text. By matching the known word, the reCAPTCHA system assumes you correctly matched the unknown word as well. Over time if enough people agree on what the unknown word was, it is committed as the correct "translation." Neat! You can read more about reCAPTCHA on their website here.

I'll keep an eye on activity over the next weeks and see if the number of either the spam messages or legitimate submissions drop. If it seems that this is deterring people from sending in info, I may have to revisit the service or the implementation. Let me know if you have any problems or if things are acting squirrely. Let's band together fellow humans and help fight spam!

Otherwise, over the last couple of weeks I've rolled out some small but noteworthy updates:

• You may have noticed the Google ads. I'm not a big fan of ads (who is really?), but I figured if they were done in a not-too-annoying fashion, I might be able to offset some of my hosting, emailing and technical expenses. $0.24 down so far! I will always do my best to make sure they do not interfere with or detract from the important stuff on any given page.
• I improved the design of events in the small lists so you get more information up front and a brief excerpt with an image on rollover. I think it looks a lot better.
• On artist, venue and event pages there is a new "Share this" button that opens a little panel with tons of ways to post info to third party sites or email a link to a page to someone. It's a really easy way to post something to Facebook, for example, if you want to share a page with friends.
• For a while now there has been the option to send event info to Google or Yahoo calendars on event detail pages. I just added a third option supported by most desktop calendar clients - iCalendar. You may have to download the file and drag it into your calendar program depending on how your browser is set up to handle ".ics" files. Give it a shot and let me know if you have any problems or suggestions.
• Related to the external calendar options noted above, you can now add what I call "dependent" events to external calendars as well. These types of events include artists' talks, receptions, etc. that are part of a larger show or event. Just look for the text link "Add to calendar" under the special event dates.

Thanks again and here's hoping for another great year ahead!

I have been making stuff for the web for 10 years and not much has changed during that time as far as how people interact with the Internet. You sat at a desk and used a mouse to click around a web page on a screen the size of a small TV that loads data through a phone or cable line. Now you have a miniature computer in your pocket that pulls data out of the sky and you use your fingers to manipulate objects on the screen. Pretty cool.

These days I find myself using my phone browser almost as much as my desktop one and I am learning more about the differences between the two, both good and bad. Of course one of the first things that came to mind was "Hey, let's make a version of Happenstand optimized for small displays and touch screens."

Since the site is already fairly minimal in design, it holds up pretty well as is in mobile browsers, but I decided to accept the challenge and take it as an opportunity to learn something new. After a few days of tinkering, I am happy to share with you the results that can be found here: m.happenstand.com

As usual, it's an experiment and a work in progress. This is definitely not intended for devices other than those with full browsers like the iPhone, iPod touch and Android-powered systems. You can't do everything here you can on the full site, but I included the things that I thought made sense in an "on-the-go" experience. I'm sure I will be tweaking things as I discover what I like, what I don't like, what I miss and what I don't need by using it more myself. Hopefully in an upcoming version of mobile Safari a web page can access the phone's location data - then we'll really have some exciting stuff to play with.

Tip: Don't forget, on the iPhone when viewing a page in Safari, you can hit the "+" button at the bottom of the screen and select "Add to Home Screen" to create a shortcut to the site directly from your phone's home screen.

If you have any thoughts or something's not working for you, shoot me a note using the contact form. Giddy up.

So if you're on the FB, click here to go to the Happenstand page and "Become a Fan" to receive occasional notifications of site-related news.

The result is what I am calling Pulse (not sure if that name will stick, but it's the first thing I thought of). I grabbed the RSS feeds from a handful of sites I check in on from time to time and created a system to pull them all together and spit out the 20 most recently updated items. This was a very quick effort and I may have to fine-tune some things, but it does the job of giving you a snapshot of what's going on in different corners of the city right now. There is no archive and the list changes as often as the source sites post new items. In the future I might break the list out into separate views by category (reviews, interviews, galleries, general, etc.) or similar. I could use the same idea to pull in Twitter feeds or Flickr photos as well, but one step at time.

If you have suggestions of other sites to include, please use the contact form to send me note. Enjoy!

In other news, I've rolled out a couple of other updates around the site over the past couple weeks. The event suggestion form received a little more love since it is the primary means of getting info into the system. It was difficult to handle the event info and image uploading all in one place and have it not be confusing on the front end when things broke or the form contained invalid data or the images didn't meet the requirements, etc. So now the suggestion process has been broken up into two steps. This makes for a simpler form up front and an optional second form afterward. The improved image upload form lets you upload multiple images all in one screen and see how they will look on the site. Sweet!

Another thing that has bugged me for a while is that to see the location information for an event, you would have to leave the event page and go to the venue page just to see the address or phone number. Lame! Now at the bottom of each event page, if the event has been associated with a venue from the site, you will see the location information and a small map. These new maps are also displayed on the venue detail pages (example). Please note, these maps only show the location for the one item - if you want to see all venues in an area on a map and what is happening at each of them now, use the full Happenstand events map.

I also updated the way the upcoming events and past events lists look at the bottom of artist pages and place pages. The old way to toggle views with a small text link seemed a little un-obvious to me and I've been into big tabs lately, so presto-chango, it is done (example).

I've also been playing with code compressing, caching and some other tricks to get pages loading faster. Things have have felt a little sluggish lately but I am happier now after some additional tweaks this week.

So now I can start working on new features that everyone can enjoy. I've got a few ideas and with the holidays coming up, some time to play. More to come soon...

One of the best things that has been happening lately is that I am receiving more and more event suggestions from you, the local arts community. This is awesome. It saves me a lot of time and usually provides much more useful information than what I can dig up on my own. However, I've also learned that there is a downside to becoming more popular...

The main reason I liked the original suggestion form was that it was super simple to use. It was basically a single text box that you could paste your press release or announcement or email message or whatever you had into and hit the "Send" button. Unfortunately, the cost of making things easy for you is that it makes things more complicated for me. After receiving a new event suggestion and deciding that it should be posted, I'd have to dig through the message and pull out the event name and dates and time and links, all of which takes time. Then I would have to do this for every suggestion that lands in my inbox. Adding all this up leaves little time left for me to focus on creating new features or making the site run more smoothly, so I thought it was time to start turning over some of that responsibility over to you. Congratulations!

Really there are only a few new form fields, some of them optional, and now you can add up to three images for each event you submit. What might take each of you a couple of extra minutes will save me hours a week. Another benefit is that events will show up on the site faster. Although this seems like a minor update, it is exciting for me because it is the first small step toward sharing control over how things get added to the site. Over time I'd like to start opening up more pieces of the site for you all to help contribute to directly, as well as help keep things current and accurate.

So give it a spin and send in your next event!

What's new?
For you there really shouldn't be much of a huge difference right now. There is a new header and footer with clearer menus that should make it easier to jump around to everything you need. Otherwise, there are several small changes that probably won't even be noticeable right away, but I hope you'll find useful or improved as you come across them while you use the site. I've been keeping a wish list of small tweaks for a while and managed to cross a few off as I worked through the rewrite.

The most important change to note - as a result of rearchitecting the site, all pages have a new address. This really only affects anyone that linked to or bookmarked a specific page as that old address will no longer work. This includes all links from any previous event emails. It should be easy to track something down again using the search form if you are looking for something specific. There is another consequence of this change that is important to point out - all RSS feeds have a new address. This only affects people that have previously subscribed to a RSS feed (the old feeds will not show new data, if any depending on your reader). You will have to update the address or unsubscribe, then re-subscribe to any feeds you want to follow. A list of all available feeds can be found on the Feeds page.

If you're reading this, you found another addition to the site - the Happenstand blog. I wanted a place to post news, updates, changes... really whatever that has anything to do with the site that I want to share with you guys. Of course there's a RSS feed for it as well.

Looking forward
I still have a lot of ideas for things I would like to add to and do with the site. For example, there are a lot of folks in the area doing great stuff online and I'd like to work on ways of pulling together the best of that content to follow in one place in a nice format. I've also been thinking a lot about accessing information from mobile devices so that's something I'd like to learn more about. And those are just a couple of things I want to look at first... I always have more ideas than time so no promises on anything more or when.

Feedback?
Have any comments or suggestions to make the site better? I am always happy to hear what people think about things since I spend a lot time working on it. Actually, the best part of running the site for me has been getting to meet and chat with people around town doing cool things. Hit the Contact page to say "Hi" or the Suggest page to add your next Bay Area arts event.