Echographia

Lately I’ve been trying to help Touring Machine help me. Adding a new venue is a little tedious: Typing, or copy and pasting, a name, URL, description, address, sometimes phone and email, and tags. It’s not a big deal for one venue, but when I’m researching venues in a new city, it gets tiresome. And it’s only going to get worse as I add more fields to the database.

The frustrating part is, all that information is out there already, and it’s not hard to find. I’m usually just copying from Google results, the first or second hit, or a MySpace page:

So why am I doing all the Control-C, Control-V?

If I give Touring Machine a URL, it should be able to guess the venue name (page title) and maybe an address or phone number, if they’re on the page. If I supply a name and city, it should get the address, and maybe URL, from a search engine. If they’re on MySpace, why not grab the “About Me” for a first-draft description? It should even be possible to scan the page for words that match popular tags - bar, cafe, restaurant, jazz, rock, folk.

Well, I’ve been working on it. The next few posts - unless I get sidetracked - will describe the design and implementation so far.

After the Barefoot site launched, I got a lot of nice feedback about it, mostly from people who work for the cafe.  “Looks great!” they said, and I wasn’t quite sure how to react.  I was proud of how the site worked, but the look of the site, I thought, was entirely thanks to Conrad Altmann, the designer.

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