My San Francisco Wishlist: Part One
Hi San Francisco,
I really love you as a city. You’re far more exciting and diverse than my native Detroit. You have so many neighborhoods, with so much personality. There are more restaurants per capita here than anywhere else in North America they say. You offer parades and bars and people of every persuasion. But I do have a few problems with you. This is one of them:
Why is so hard to figure out what to do every weekend? Why do I always hear about things after they happen? What I’d like from you San Francisco–what I would really love in this great city of ours, is a centralized calendar telling me everything that is happening on any given day.
Sure, we have Squidlist and MetBlogs and SFist and the Chron for some local events. And every concert venue has their own calendar online. The SFBG and SFWeekly have their own claendars, and for sexy events you can check the ErosBlog calendar. But I don’t want to have to check two dozen sites to figure out what there is to do on any given Sunday. I want to check one.
Why isn’t there a central site that culls all the info about what’s happening, and then provides to us in a simple, searchable interface? Anyone out there interested in engaging in the tireless, thankless task of making one? I know I’m asking a lot here, San Francisco, but it’s only cause I love you.
PS If you have any great suggestions for calendar sites that would fill this hole in my heart, please respond in the comments below.
upcoming.org isn’t too bad. The calendar in the Onion is also pretty good. And Flavorpill (http://beta.sf.flavorpill.net/) who also has a great weekly event mailing.
You can use Google Calendar as an aggregator and add any calendars that have XML or iCal feeds. They also have a database of public calendars. Individual calendars can be displayed or hidden (on the same, single month grid) at will with a checkbox toggle. More info at Google here.
It’s also really handy if you have an SO, since you can subscribe to his or her calendar (if they give you permission) to keep up on joint events (if you’re like me and your SO is the “organizer”).
Have you tried the calendar on SFstation? One page yields such eclectica as a show at the Great American Music Hall, gay sports, an exibit at the Legion of Honor, a double feature at the Castro, and happy hour Wednesday at Fluid. The calendar page is here: http://www.sfstation.com/calendar/
Maybe not everything that’s happening on a given day, but pretty close.
The other cool thing about upcoming.org is that its events show up in the sidebar on Metblogs, right between Photos and Metroblogging Cities. Handy!
I’m with everyone else on Upcoming.Org. Nifty.
Maybe you’re looking for too many choices? Do you check ALL of those calendars every weekend, end up paralyzed with indecision and then overly regretful when you hear about something *else* that you missed the listing for?
I just had the same discussion with a friend when we were deciding where to go last Friday night. I’ll throw Tribe into the list of places to look, but that doesn’t solve the main problem: no central, complete list of everything happening in the city.
I agree that upcoming is a pretty good tool, and I have used it myself, but it is definitely geek-leaning in its listings and is far from complete.
I don’t have an answer, nor am I volunteering to put together this list, but I’ll add my vote that we need this!!
I wouldn’t say “paralyzed with indecision,” but I do regularly see things that have happened in the Chron or on SFist and wish I had known about them *before* they happened.
Also, thanks for all of the responses. I shall check each and every one of these suggestions out.