What the hell is Joe Blog supposed to be?
Like a community noticeboard where Jo'burgers can let others know what's going on. At the moment, it's just a gig-guide with some theatre listings. The aim is to let people know what's happening at alternative venues rather than just the bigger places which can afford to advertise.
How to use Joe Blog
Adding Events
Joe Blog is free! I've had a couple of e-mails asking how much it costs to be listed on Joe Blog, and the answer is nothing. All you have to do is e-mail me the details, and I'll add it (provided it passes my editorial judgement).
Clicking Add Event brings up a form which gets e-mailed to me to add to the database when I get round to it.
A better way is for venue owners to manage their own folders. If you are a venue owner, contact me for a login and password to the form in your venue's folder. Events will then appear instantly and you can keep your contact details correct.
Searching
Date searching finally works! Searching for either May 24 or 24 May would bring up just today's events. In the Google convention, unless or is put between keywords, and is assumed: ie blank spaces are "anded". In Joe Blog's weird logic, the word and as well as commas are treated as or in search phrases. Searches are case insensitive. Unfortunately, unlike Google, my search engine doesn't handle typos.
Only the current database of events is searched. So if you want the address of a venue, rather click on Venues.
Adding Articles
Content is very sparse at the moment, so please feel free to send profiles on your band, play or whatever. Now that I've got most of the programming done, I'm hoping to get down to writing reviews and interviews.
Now on Facebook!
Kevin Flee of the Death Valley Blues Band has dragged me kicking and screaming into the new millenium by starting a Joe Blog group which you can join here.
For some reason, facebook refuses permission for me to join this group myself. Just as well, since I don't care to belong to any facebook group that will have me as a member.
(I've subsequently discovered you have to be a member of the South Africa network to be able to join the Joe Blog Facebook group.)
How to get hit on the web
The server log shows Joe Blog gets crawled a lot by Googlebot (used by Google and Yahoo!), MSNBot, Inktomi Slurp (used by Ananzi)... basically all the major search engines.
Joe Blog also supports a new technology, OpenSearch developed by Amazon.com for its a9.com search engine. This uses a website's own search engine to query its current database rather than relying on outdated information crawled by traditional bots.
When filling in the details of an event, a good tip is to provide as many proper nouns as possible — names of all the musicians if it is a band, all the actors if it is a play, or the names of all the comedians if it is a stand-up evening. As can be seen from the log of keyphrases which led to this site from search engines, this is how people use search engines.
Your site chokes my browser
I have tried to make this site work with all browsers by getting it to pass these online tests:
If this site does not work with your browser despite my efforts to validate my markup, please contact me.
Similar Sites
I initially thought a daily listings guide was a brilliantly original idea, but after getting this site up and running stumbled on plenty of others already doing a similar job:
- http://www.joburg.org.za/calendar/index.stm
- http://www.artslink.co.za/annual_calendar.htm
- http://www.highveld.co.za/thelounge/jobiz/jobiz.asp
- http://www.702.co.za/events/whatson/whatson.asp
- http://www.5fm.co.za/events/EventsGigGuide.aspx
- http://www.samusic.co.za
- http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/music/listing/music-jhb.htm
- http://www.zazone.com/gigguide.asp
- http://johannesburg.craigslist.org
- http://www.roekeloos.co.za/ritme/musiekdagboek.html
- http://www.grantavenue.co.za
All the above sites,along with joeblog.co.za, offer a free service to let alternative venues attract an audience for local performers. If I was an alternative venue owner, I would e-mail the details of forthcoming shows to all of them, but please do http://www.joeblog.co.za/addevent first.