I'm interested in your automation strategy. Many organizers like Fresh New Conference Sites every year, which means scraping for the dates and locations is likely to break each year.
I was joking but after thinking about it the Meta Conference might attract a small but fascinating audience. I doubt it would be boring. Organizing it is probably the easiest conference ever organized. You just ask for help along with the invitations.
It's such a dumb idea it <s>might</s> will actually work.
The tool is super useful. However, your search could be bether with respect to geography. Let me explain ..
I am in the Bay area, and I'm interested in all local tech conferences. Seems like if I search for SF, I only see conferences in that city. What would be useful is to gather commutable geos together. When I was on the east coast, NY, NJ, CT and MA conferences were all reachable in a day trip, which is why that was my region of interest.
I think someone did this for hackathons too but not sure if that died off. Another idea is to link to previous iterations of conferences.
Final thought .. you could mine ACM/IEEE conferences .. those are tech-relevant.
I agree on the ACM/IEEE part! A lot of the bigger conferences do quite a bit to appeal to practitioners (as opposed to just academics).
For example, ACM CHI has a huge expo for demos and tech companies. IEEE/ACM ICSE has an industry track (now known as Software Engineering in Practice).
I have this problem with an aggregator I created (sfhacks.com) which used to list hackathons in the San Francisco Bay area. It has jobs that scrape various sources for potential hackathons, and I used to go through and pick the relevant ones and fill in some boxes. It got very few visitors though, and eventually (I'm not proud of this) I basically stopped going through the drudgery of keeping it up to date. I think fully automating it somehow would lead to too much junk and too many duplicated entries.
For a much more complete listing (although with a somewhat different focus) you can also use the LWN community calendar, which has been around for what feels like forever: https://lwn.net/Calendar/
Lanyrd is a dead site walking. They were acquired by Eventbrite ~4 years ago, and haven't seen any meaningful updates since May 2014. Their social media accounts have been completely dead for two years. The site has frequent uptime and spam issues, and attempts to reach out to Eventbrite folks are met with complete silence.
And yet, it still exists, running along with juuust enough inertia to crowd out any potential replacements.
If you're reading this and work at Eventbrite: Please, lobby internally to put Lanyrd out of its misery.
I can't say much on the subject, at least not without official approval, but understand that the original Lanyrd team have not forgotten about the site; asking us to fix it isn't really giving us any new information (sadly).
If you want to make requests of any kind you're better off reaching out to Eventbrite directly.
While technically not a conference, you're missing a big one: SHA2017 in The Netherlands [1]. Starts the 4th of August, and there are still some tickets left.
This would be a great feature for me too. I'm looking for conferences I can apply to speak at, and it's often kind of difficult to extract basic info like this from event sites.
It would also be good to see similar info for conferences that have exhibitor booths.
Does this do direct match on location only, or search in a radius? San Francisco only shows things happening in the city proper, no surrounding areas. Could be that's all there is but I'd expect other parts of the bay to show up as well.
Direct match on location now, radius next. Plus the database is still in process of being loaded; it's just started, I'm sure I miss tons of conferences for now :)
Notice that the app doesn't really keep a history of state. After executing a search, back arrow on browser doesn't do what the user would expect. Either give a "reset" option, or better, don't break the browser and implement something like pushState()
This will sound like a strange suggestion, but think about collecting people's emails and sending out an email every quoter or so with a list of conferences. Of all the newsletters I wouldn't mind this one at all.
It isn't :) It is basically a must do before any launch, but I did not expect so much interest to be honest so I only focused on the core functionality first.
This will sound like a strange suggestion, but think about collecting people's emails and sending out an email every quoter or so with a list of conferences. Of all the newsletters I wouldn't mind this one at all.
Just some design thoughts that you could consider:
I think you could better separate the actionable filter items from the branding parts. So, in a thin top tier, have your brand top left, "Find conferences near you" in the middle, and perhaps "Add a conference" top right. This will give you more room to fit conferences on screen - at the moment it's a bit sparse - 500px before I get to the listing itself.
Then you can have the filters and search boxes in their own area and have more room to make it really obvious that their use impacts the list below without the line "Know a conference..." in between.
You could consider updating "Upcoming conferences" with info pertaining to the search. e.g., "Conferences in Jul-Sep 2018".
I can appreciate that "18" alone saves space, but my first thought was that it was September 18th. You could use 2018 or '18 maybe?
Put a max width on the conference icons and a margin on the right - the widest ones are butting up against their names.
94 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadFull disclosure - this is my site -- but you can join and keep track of conferences.
A calendar with a tag cloud that can be toggled.
A world map with the same tag cloud.
Work backwards and make it into an archive of-
a conference about conferences.
1. Create website that aggregates something tech event
2. Drive traffic to it through SEO and by utilizing the FOMO
3. Create a conference about tech conferences and have an instant audience
It's such a dumb idea it <s>might</s> will actually work.
I am in the Bay area, and I'm interested in all local tech conferences. Seems like if I search for SF, I only see conferences in that city. What would be useful is to gather commutable geos together. When I was on the east coast, NY, NJ, CT and MA conferences were all reachable in a day trip, which is why that was my region of interest.
I think someone did this for hackathons too but not sure if that died off. Another idea is to link to previous iterations of conferences.
Final thought .. you could mine ACM/IEEE conferences .. those are tech-relevant.
For example, ACM CHI has a huge expo for demos and tech companies. IEEE/ACM ICSE has an industry track (now known as Software Engineering in Practice).
Also whenever I type anything into the "Keyword" box nothing is returned.
This way the user only has to type one location instead of trying a bunch of places near him/her.
For a much more complete listing (although with a somewhat different focus) you can also use the LWN community calendar, which has been around for what feels like forever: https://lwn.net/Calendar/
And yet, it still exists, running along with juuust enough inertia to crowd out any potential replacements.
If you're reading this and work at Eventbrite: Please, lobby internally to put Lanyrd out of its misery.
If you want to make requests of any kind you're better off reaching out to Eventbrite directly.
It's a shame it's been left to languish.
Seems like this should be a feature of papercall.io which seemingly has a more obvious path to sustainable revenue.
[1] https://wiki.sha2017.org/w/Main_Page
It would also be good to see similar info for conferences that have exhibitor booths.
You might want to fix this.
I think you could better separate the actionable filter items from the branding parts. So, in a thin top tier, have your brand top left, "Find conferences near you" in the middle, and perhaps "Add a conference" top right. This will give you more room to fit conferences on screen - at the moment it's a bit sparse - 500px before I get to the listing itself.
Then you can have the filters and search boxes in their own area and have more room to make it really obvious that their use impacts the list below without the line "Know a conference..." in between.
You could consider updating "Upcoming conferences" with info pertaining to the search. e.g., "Conferences in Jul-Sep 2018".
I can appreciate that "18" alone saves space, but my first thought was that it was September 18th. You could use 2018 or '18 maybe?
Put a max width on the conference icons and a margin on the right - the widest ones are butting up against their names.
http://testingconferences.org/