Music. Song. Tune. Melody. Harmony. Listening. Coming together. Joining in. Dancing.

Sharing music is paramount. It’s the reason why...

but Live Music Events don’t just happen. Folk Music Clubs don’t just happen.

Festivals don’t just happen. Regular jams don’t just happen. Bands don’t just happen.

People talk about it, desire it, organize it, and make it happen through a lot of effort and sharing information.

♦︎

Okay, this example is the 39 Days festival in Duncan.

Finding the 39 Days of July Festival roster of Dates-Times-Players and munging the data to fit my webpage format
took a lot of steps.

First, I found their newly posted information using my macOS Safari web browser...

♦︎

Figure 1. The 39 Days of July Festival Calendar webpage showing “Fri. June 28th”
followed by “Noon” (space) “Dennis & Andy” (highlighted):

     

Note by the size of the browser window’s scroll bar handle (top-right) how long the webpage is...



So I collected the data:

♦︎

Figure 2. The 39 Days of July Festival webpage text, copy-and-pasted into a BBEdit text file
(the first 35 lines of 1451 lines). Notice “Noon” “Dennis & Andy” show up on line 28:

     

With “Show Invisibles” turned on, BBEdit draws spaces as a grey middot, e.g. [······]



♦︎

Figure 3. Here’s lines 35 to 69:

     

...with lots of spaces...




♦︎

Figure 4. Scrolling down, lines 171 to 195 are an example of a lot of text and spaces that I don’t want...

     



♦︎

Figure 5. ...as do lines 527 to 558:

     

...the scroll bar handle shows we’re just over a third of the way down the page.




♦︎

Figure 6. Here’s lines 658 to 685:

     

...BBEdit soft-wraps extremely long lines of text, so in this window the text of line 685
 displays as four “lines”, the beginning part is numbered 685 and the subsequent three parts
 are each marked with an ellipsis.






♦︎

Figure 7. And finally,  the last lines (1417 to 1451) from the copy-and-paste:

     

...I don’t know what “POWERED BY SQUARESPACE” is supposed to mean, but okay.




♦︎

Figure 8. This is my BBEdit file after I have done a lot of clean-up: getting rid of unnecessary space characters --
  to a computer each character, or “glyph” is one byte of data, or 2 bytes, 4 bytes, or 8 bytes, depending on your
  computer’s file system and hardware architecture;
-- also getting rid of unnecessary returns; spell-checking; and so on...

     

...my target file uses a simple standardised format for each LME (Live Music Event)
by Date,
a quarter-note glyph (♩) and line-return,
Performer | Start-time (and End-time if posted),
Venue, Address.



♦︎

Figure 9. The BBEdit Find/Replace dialogue offers some useful actions...

     



♦︎

Figure 10. ...and the Find/Replace History button reveals a drop-down of your previous actions:

     

...including GREP pattern search-and-replace.



♦︎

Figure 11. Here’s my text file showing “Dennis & Andy” on line 3165; remember “Dennis & Andy”?

     




♦︎

Figure 12. And here’s “Dennis & Andy” on line 4210 of the actual HTML webpage:

     

...the peculiar strings of &# +(numbers; or text;) -- conveniently coloured red by BBEdit -- are Unicode Escape Characters
 because web browsers don’t universally understand a lot of software glyph encoding, which is why
  you can still find webpages that contain one or more empty boxes (glyph-sized, white, with a black border) to this day...



♦︎

Figure 13. And here is my webpage, in a Safari window, with “Dennis & Andy” highlighted:

     

... remember “Dennis & Andy”?




♦︎

Figure 14. And I use one last app, Transmit, to upload the webpage file to the VFMS website. Yay.

     


♦︎

My webpage contains 275 “39 Days of July” LMEs for the month of July 2024, which is “only” 31 days long.

The amount of work Longevity John and crew put into their yearly Festival in Duncan boggles the mind!



-30-

♩
♩
Web Design by Ron Gillmore, for the Victoria Folk Music Society
♩
♩