I’ve gone through the list of venues and added new ones that have appeared in Oslo over the last year, so the Concerts in Oslo web site (and apps for iOS and Android) should now be more updated.
The site works by scraping the web pages of counts on fingers 84 venues and tries to make sense of the concert listings. Of course, these days many venues outsource the listings to Facebook, which is a blessing and a curse: It means that I don’t have to write scraping software for so many different sites, but it’s also just kinda difficult to actually scrape Facebook:
Because the HTML is (I guess purposefully?) obfuscated to make it difficult to do what I’m doing. Gotta keep the users on the site!
But so far, so good, I guess — I mean, they change the HTML frequently, and since it’s so obfuscated, the software basically has to guess at what the concert listing is, so sometimes there’s a gazillion bogus entries that I have to clear out manually and then stare at the code for a couple of hours.
(It’s fun when they change the dates from “THURSDAY 24th” to “NEXT THURSDAY” to “THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW” to “C’MON YOU KNOW WHEN” or whatever the next thing is going to be.)
Oh, well.
Anyway, if there’s any venues in Oslo that I’ve missed that you think should be listed, drop me a note.