evie404 / bay.lgbt

The missing LGBTQ+ events board for SF Bay

bay.lgbt

an lgbt events aggregator for the SF bay!
yes!

The bay.lgbt story (filled with, choices)

• anarchism.nyc is pretty neat! I wonder if the bay has one
• let's rewrite the codebase, (✨ but using a frontend framework that might deprecate in a few years ✨)
• let's spend an unreasonable amount of time making it look pretty, before getting any functionality xd
• let's have the client fetch everything; too lazy to get a server run (haha)
• CORS, my old friend... time look for a free CORS proxy :3
• wow the rate limit for Eventbrite sucks. I also don't want client auth...
• ok fine let's make a server
• ...what if we also added server-side rendering?
• ...what if... we hosted on Vercel, despite being in debt?
• stale-while-revalidate arc: let's add excessive caching & rate limits so i can sleep at night
• why does everyone use Instagram for events?
• Please stop using Instagram for events. Please stop using Instagram for events. (x100)
• to parse Instagram posts for anything resembling a structured event format, we would probably need to use GPT
• we should also DB server to cache the results so I don't bleed money from OpenAI calls. But Vercel is serverless, so can't use sqlite... pain....
• why do some Instagram posts... only include event information in the image??
• Please stop using Instagram for events. Please stop using Instagram for events. (x100)
• let's add an OCR AI API 🫠
• stares at Google's labyrinthian docs for 3 hours figuring out how to get auth
• ok, it works! but any of these calls might fail... let's sketchily add caching at each step
• (Please stop using Instagram for events. Please stop using Instagram for events.) (x10)
• suddenly running into Vercel's 10 sec timeout for Free tier (why does Eventbrite take so long??): more pain 😀. Fork $20/mo to Vercel for a 60 sec timeout instead
• open beta! (ꈍ ‿ ꈍ ✿)
• surprise surprise: Instagram's API is once again causing issues- 200 requests per hour (per user, of which there is 1 in this case). let's spread out the requests but milk that limit as much as possible.
• adds many various other APIs (Wix, Squarespace, With Friends, etc.)- not too bad but fearful that APIs make change/break at any time, haha...
• adds a frightening number of event sources all around the bay
• realize the potential endless API hell I've gotten myself into- takes a cold shower and puts up Donation link

Development

TODO

Funding

Donations to keep bay.lgbt running are appreciated! Transparently, here are the costs to maintain the site:

• Domain: $7.5/mo
• Verce1: $20/mo
• OpenAI: ~$10/mo
• Google Vision OCR: ~$5/mo