FAQ — Baltimore DIY Calendar Crawler

What Is This?

This is a website with a Baltimore-area DIY events listing with calendar integration. The events are added by automated crawling (with permission) from a number of public websites. The aggregator runs daily-ish and crawls a few different public sites and converts their listings of events into calendar events.

The crawler makes an effort to update when shows are cancelled or moved, but it's not perfect. Often the end times are a guess. Use yr common sense before going to any of these shows, and please be kind in diy and performance spaces.

What Sources Do the Events Come From?

This calendar draws from a number of public sources, all of whom have given the crawler permission to crawl their data:

You can also subscribe to individual sources - please note, the de-duplicator removes some events from some calendars so they don't show up twice, so each calendar may not reflect what is on the source website. This feature is experimental and may never be as reliable as the full list:

2640 Space 8 events
Black Cat DC 32 events
Current Space 13 events
Greedy Reads 6 events
Metro Gallery 48 events
Ottobar 94 events
Red Emma's 20 events
Rhizome DC 50 events
ShowPlace 281 events
The Red Room at Normal's 4 events
Wax Atlas 10 events

Can I Submit an Event?

That's not what this is, this is just an aggregator. If you come up with a new source, please get in touch and i'll review it to add here.

Why are there Google Alternatives Now?

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction movement has identified Google as a pressure target. For pressure targets, the movement calls for users to use other services when available. To support this request, the Baltimore DIY Calendar Crawler is now available in many different formats, including raw ics. See https://www.notechforapartheid.com/ and https://bdsmovement.net/Guide-to-BDS-Boycott for more details.

If you still have the old link in your Google calendar, it still works for now, but this may change in the future as the movement's strategies shift. The ics link to Google Calendar above will always work so long as Google supports ics. It should be noted that Microsoft links are also provided, and Microsoft is also a pressure target. I encourage you not to use these services, but they're there if you need them.

Is This a Beta Version?

Yes. There are a few issues to work out - some events with weird formatting don't parse correctly, multi-day events don't work, the de-duplicator needs work with false positives, error handling could be better, and I'd like to automate the crawling so results are accurate up to the hour.

Privacy "policy"

I don't want yr data, but this site does store some data about your preferences in cookies:

Your preferred calendar
Your preferred map tool
Your preferred theme
Your bookmarked events

All of these are stored on your device and I don't have access to them. I don't store any of your data that I could use it or that I could provide it back to you.

Thanks

The utmost gratitude for everyone who performs at and runs these shows, and special thanks to Showplace for their effort in collecting so many of these events.