focofun.co Tracks Music Scene in Fort Collins, Colorado

There is a lot of music happening in movie theaters, breweries, bowling allies as well as traditional venues. I have always enjoyed local music festivals like NewWestFest and Focomx that provided a structure to catch some national and local bands. But for the rest of the year, I was at a loss to know where to see music. Mostly I would hear about it from friends who actively kept checking Facebook or individual web sites to keep up to date.

The only place I knew that kept a calender of happenings was the Scene web site. But from my experience, it was hard to find things among the noise. There were events from all over the state and it included many non-music events without a way to filter out what I wanted. Furthermore the listings seem to be hit or miss depending if someone felt like creating them for some combination of performer or venue.

I ended up creating focofun.co for solve this problem for me. I hope it is useful to others.

How it works (for the technical or curious)

I ended up writing a bunch of web scraping programs in Python that go to various venue web sites and parse the events and pull them into a central listing that I maintain. The venue web sites vary from manually edited Wordpress to structured JSON listings. Mostly these scrapers can run automatically with no intervention.

The focofun.co website was written using React to display the events in a calender using Material Design bootstrap components. The cards used are progressive so they can adapt to various browsers running with various screen dimensions.

I have tried to keep the design simple and clean and had to hold myself back from adding more functionality that would clutter up the interface.

Support

For questions or comments please send mail to alpineapp@gmail.com.