Calendar madness

Those online city guides and calendars, they sure are handy, right? You're in St. Louis or Chicago or Denver for the night and you want to go to the theatre or a gallery or go hear a good band, so you log on and search by date for what you're interested in. Easy, eh?

Not if you're a venue operator. For us, they're a pain in the ass.

About once a month, I get e-mail from a new website that has undertaken as their mission to be the place to go for information about events in St. Louis. They are going to maintain Calendar Supremo, a one-stop shop for all the details on theatre|art|music|entertainment in the metro area.

And I sigh heavily and add them to the list of (at this writing) 26 other sites I have to update with information about our events. We produce nearly 400 public performances and events every season. Assuming I can enter each into a web database—each of which wants the information in a different order or format— in, say, two minutes (and I can't), that's 13 hours of work per calendar. Over eight weeks of solid work, just to keep up.

I can't not participate in these calendars. For one thing, as sure as I decide to skip one of the more obscure ones, that's the one my boss checks religiously and wonders why we're not listed. For another, I can't be sure which ones have an audience of users hungry for information about local theatre, and I can't be sure which one will be the next "big thing" that everyone turns to to get events information.

So I grit my teeth and thank the stars that copy and paste eliminates at least some of the work and spend hour after hour on my butt in front of the computer repeating myself 26 times.

I love how the web makes my life easier as a user sometimes. This, however, sucks.

What I want to do, and what I know is theoretically possible, is to put all of my season information in one file of a particular format—XML, tab-delimited text, whatever—and either put it on my server or be able to upload it to each calendar and be done. Write once, read many...time-saving and error-reducing into the bargain.

I've inquired of the folks who do the major city guides. They all agree it would save me a lot of work and nod sympathetically when I tell them they're not the only game in town and the effort of servicing a dozen different calendars is breaking my figurative back. They're not inclined to change the system, however, or adopt a syndication format or standardized data-entry method that would make it easier. After all, if every calendar and city guide had the same information, no one could be the best, see?

I understand, to a point, and I appreciate competition and the way it has of encouraging innovation and all that rot. But here's the deal: These services that rely on the goodwill and "free" labor of venue managers and publicists to provide them with free content and then make it hard as hell to do are beyond beginning to piss me off.

If you really want to support and promote the arts and culture, let me easily tell people about my events and then get back to the business of, you know, actually producing them. If you can't do that, I may begin to suspect you're really more interested in just making a buck.

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