RSS Feeds for Events in Dublin
So, now that I’m back in Dublin, I’ve taken a quick look around for ways to keep up to date on upcoming live gigs — and found that the situation, frankly, sucks. In particular, almost none of the sites are offering RSS or Atom feeds yet.
Having said that, Waxy and Leonard’s Upcoming.org is doing quite nicely for the Dublin metro area:
Upcoming.org: Dublin EventsAnd lots of credit for the promoter, MCD, who seem to be just about the only Irish listings site who offer RSS:
This is fantastic, but — naturally — they don’t cover events put on by their competitors. ;)
Apart from that, it’s pretty shoddy. Lots of late-90’s-looking websites out there, and no feeds in sight. Thankfully, Feed43, and some perl scripting, is on hand to allow me to take matters into my own hands.
Entertainment Ireland offer a pretty good music news section — but sans feed. Feed43 saves the day:
And, surprisingly, Ticketmaster, of all sites, is turning out to be a great way to find out what’s on in Dublin, listing pretty much all ticketed events in a nice, clean, succinct format. Unfortunately, the highest location resolution it offers for Ireland is the country as a whole. However, this can be worked around by subscribing to individual venues, such as Crawdaddy or The Village. (This has a happy side-effect of narrowing down the types of music — I can skip finding out that The Eagles are playing, since they won’t be playing at Crawdaddy ;)
For some reason, though, Ticketmaster haven’t got around to offering their own RSS feeds. Not a problem — in response I’ve hacked up tm2rss.cgi, a little script which scrapes the venue pages and produces RSS:
For other venues, simply take the venue URL (for example, http://www.ticketmaster.ie/venue/198641 for The Village), add the numeric venue ID in place of NNNNN in this URL: http://taint.org/scraped/tm2rss.cgi?v=NNNNN , then use that as the Feed URL in your feed reader.
Tags: atom, dublin, events, feeds, gigs, ireland, listings, live-music, rss, syndication
James Corbett said,
April 6, 2006 @ 10:50 pm
I had similar complaints recently in a post entitled - “Let’s get organized”. I asked people to start entering items on Upcoming and happily a few responded which means more and more events are now showing up on the Open Irish Directory (OID)
Eventful isn’t half bad either, for example here is the schedule for the Abbey Theatre - http://eventful.com/venues/V0-001-000152875-1
Do you mind if I add your feeds to the OID for convenient feed grazing?
Justin said,
April 6, 2006 @ 11:06 pm
thanks, James, that’d be great!
Someday I will get my head around the OID ;)
I had totally missed the Eventful stuff — I was too much of an upcoming.org fan. Now to take a look at that.
Justin said,
April 9, 2006 @ 2:34 pm
update: the Eventful stuff is quite nice, but their RSS is messy — at least my feed reader (Liferea on Linux) shows each item in the feed as updating several times a day. Irritating, and it makes the feed unusable :(
James Corbett said,
April 9, 2006 @ 3:58 pm
Not if you view it in a feed grazr like Grazr :)
ct said,
April 13, 2006 @ 2:02 pm
Hmm. How about abusing Google Calendar and pushing the event information from various sources into a calendar? That would allow the information to be aggregated into a single feed and would make the info available in a shiny web calendar.
ct
Justin said,
April 13, 2006 @ 3:36 pm
hi Ciaran!
actually, looks like Google Calendar supports the iCal format and retrieval via HTTP — http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=37100 — which would be perfect for this.
Hopefully someone with some tuits will do the needful, and mash up the feeds, aggregating them into one, then convert that to iCal and publish that file on the web somewhere…. ;)
conall said,
September 11, 2006 @ 3:06 pm
I wonder how difficult it would be to parse http://www.phantomfm.com/thisweek/gigs.htm through Feed43.
Unfortunately, I don’t have to time to look into it, but it does look like a good source of gig listings
Justin said,
September 12, 2006 @ 2:22 pm
Conall –
thanks for the note. actually, I already have one for Phantom FM I hadn’t mentioned yet! Here it is, along with a few other stragglers:
http://feed43.com/aiken_promotions_front_page.xml - front page of Aiken Promotions’ site
http://feed43.com/phantom_fm_ie_gigs_page.xml - Phantom FM gigs page
http://feed43.com/oxygen_ie_gigs.xml - Oxygen.ie Gigs News page
Feed43 really is saving the day ;)
Brian Whelan said,
July 21, 2007 @ 1:49 pm
<
p>Greetings from Dublin. Here’s a listing taken from Irish Blogs.ie that your readers may have use for. [spam spam spam deleted]
Kind Regards, Brian Whelan (Manager)
Justin said,
July 22, 2007 @ 2:46 pm
Brian — Greetings from Dublin, yourself. ;)
I don’t see any RSS feed at that site. What is the relevance to this topic?
David said,
August 2, 2007 @ 4:30 am
Ticketmaster feeds seemed to have stopped working. Is there any solution available?
Thanks
David
Justin said,
August 2, 2007 @ 4:34 pm
David — thanks for the report, the page formatting had changed. it’s now fixed again…
David said,
April 5, 2009 @ 4:37 pm
Hi Justin
I think it’s stopped working again?
Regards
Justin said,
April 6, 2009 @ 11:28 am
bugger. I’ll take a look. doubtless another reformatting…
Justin said,
April 6, 2009 @ 12:02 pm
crap. This looks like it may be hard to fix :( they’ve switched to using an AJAX widget for those event times.
on the other hand — I can scrape the events directly from their JSON backend now! e.g.
http://www.ticketmaster.ie/json/search/event?vid=198641
Justin said,
April 6, 2009 @ 12:27 pm
there! sorted.