Maintaining a community based music website with open source software

Full Paper

The Newcastle Music Directory is a community based music website that covers the
music scene in and around Newcastle, NSW. This covers a region roughly from the
Hawkesbury River in the South to Taree in the North, and West to Merriwa in the upper
Hunter Valley. The site publishes over 1500 local events per month on its gig guide and
lists details of over 4000 local bands and artists and over 650 venues from the region. The
site has constantly had to be upgraded and updated to reflect the changing internet
technology over its 10 year history.

This talk focuses on the various tools that have been developed to facilitate the
maintenance of the database. Many of these tools are command line PHP scripts that are
set to run on the server as CRON jobs. News articles on the site are managed by the open
source blogging engine Wordpress, however pages generated directly from Wordpress
comprise less than 5% of the site’s pages.

Much of the information on the artists profiles is automatically discovered and imported
using numerous API’s. Videos and other media are embedded into the site from diverse
sources. Web robots have been developed to crawl links and check other external content
to ensure the currency of the information.

The talk will give particular attention to the challenges faced while maintaining the
integrity of the MySQL database that drives the site’s gig guide. They include
applications to import gigs provided by local booking agents and venues and tools to
purge stale gigs from the database and identify duplicates and conflicts.