Added a /shows Page

One hobby of mine has always been music. Growing up, I was in band (percussion) and choir. If I had been able to squeeze any more activities, I would have loved to also be part of the stage crew (by high school, I had zero spare time).

While I no longer perform music (I had to drop it when I went to college. Swimming, research, and accidentally learning programming on the side were more than enough commitments at that level), I still have a huge appreciation and love for it.

My wife also loves music, and we’ve started to make a point to attend live performances of all varieties. When possible, we bring our son. He’s only 4, so he’s still too young for many shows with age limits. That said, he’s been to the symphony, ballet, and a few other shows, and seems to enjoy them.

The more we see, the more questions keep popping up. “When did we see X?” “When was the last time we were at Theater Y?” “This year feels busier, did we see more shows than last year?” and so on. So, we started to track our shows.

Every time I updated the list though, it reminded me of updating the note I use to generate my /reading page on this site. So I thought, why not implement it for real? Introducing, my /shows page!

First, I created an org note (which I actually keep in my obsidian vault 🙃) that lists all the shows we’ve seen, have scheduled for the future, or have even missed (we had tickets but had to cancel for whatever reason). Then, I updated the webcli.clj clojure script I use to generate/stub out pages for my website, to generate the /shows page.

I group the shows by year, and have a color-coded Type column so it’s easy to see which are musicals, ballets, etc. I’m only exporting shows that we actually saw, so I don’t include ones that are tagged MISSED or SCHEDULED in the org note. They only appear when I flip the state to SEEN. I also have metadata properties to include the date and venue, which are also transferred to the table.

After some data mining of our exported calendars, I think that I have most of what we’ve seen… at least if my wife or I had it saved as an event. The one bit that I know isn’t fully up to date at the time of posting this is the venues. For example, many of the entries say something like NC Symphony, or even the Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh NC, but that location has several theaters in it. I’d love to log the actual theater stage when possible…

Anyway, I have it up and easy to generate. My plan is to use my note to plan out shows when we buy tickets (or even if there’s one we want to remember before tickets are available), and then mark them as SEEN, after we attend. When I check off a show, I can just fire off my script and update the page, like I already do when finishing a book. Easy.