His local events site checks 101 calendars every six hours so his town can see what is on
Around Elmira and Corning, New York, event listings were scattered across library systems, a brewery site, a school app, chamber newsletters and Facebook, so people found out about things the day after. He had the AI build one page that checks 101 sources across three New York counties and part of northern Pennsylvania: 1,855 listings over the next 90 days, 1,767 events after duplicates are merged, about 250 in any week, at 159 venues. A cron job reruns it every six hours on cheap shared hosting, about 8,300 lines of PHP, and cancellations mostly handle themselves because an event disappears when its source stops listing it.
How it works
- Point the AI at the problem
- Build a fetcher per source type: library calendars, WordPress event feeds, calendar files, chamber and school platforms, plus custom parsers for about 20 odd sites
- Store everything in one table keyed by source
- Merge duplicates at display time by date and title overlap, keeping the venue own listing as the winner
- Track each source health on an admin page
- Cron reruns the whole thing every six hours
Why it’s worth knowing
A one person, no budget site does the job a local paper calendar should do: it watches 101 sources, knows Troy exists in both New York and Pennsylvania, and quietly deletes cancelled events by itself.
Where it’s from
Summarized from a public post on reddit.com. See the original ↗