There’s a huge fixed unclosable signup overlay at the bottom so the viewport is limited. Also the content is not scaled down so you have to pan on two axis. Some text is so long it doesn’t fit in the viewport. Nearly literally unusable.
I love these guys. I'm not sure what learning this means for my fan ship. They never struck me as a particular no-frills aesthetic type of group. I wonder if they made this themselves or there's some story behind it.
Artist websites (IMO) have an actual purpose, keeping your audience updated with tour dates for one. Agents and venues looking for promo pictures. Festival planners looking to get a sense of your style etc.,
Artist websites have a variety of audiences.
My bet would be that they started tracking tour dates on a Google Sheet and decided to share it to a tour manager and here we are...
My guess is that this is a funky artistic choice, and that they used to have a "normal" webpage.
I checked with the wayback machine, and it looks like my guess is correct. I clicked randomly into an archive a few years old, and here's 2016 website looking a lot more like what you describe http://web.archive.org/web/20160303191156/http://www.portuga... .
I guess an audience that you left out in your description is people appreciating the experience of looking at the website or the artist themselves wanting to make a statement. I think the band has thoroughly "made it" so to speak, and doesn't have to worry too much about most of what you mentioned. They do list tour dates in their google sheet and also can sell out pretty large venues easily, and I don't think there are any festival planners who don't know who Portugal, the Man who have any chance of nabbing them for their festival.
Ahhh that totally makes sense. Thanks for researching and sharing.
Portugal The Man is "made" but
my concern was that the new bands that are still struggling to make it should not take inspiration from this and create a google sheets website.
That would be terrible for their career.
I would hope that a website wouldn’t make or break an artist. It’s about the music after all. Outside of looking at this post, I don’t think I could tell you what a single musician’s webpage looks like. It’s not something I ever look at.
For concerts, I tend to look for who is coming to venues near me, rather than looking at 200 band websites and hoping they are both on tour and near me.
Do most people go to the band’s actual site to learn this stuff?
For a great many people, the artists own website is the last place they’d look for the artist.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Spotify would all rank much higher.
Even as someone who doesn’t do social media, I would still turn to YouTube and Spotify before I’d even bother looking for their band website. In fact the only time over ever visited an artists website in the last 10 years was to buy merch from their official stores.
Furthermore, people’s first impression of an artist is seeing them live at a festival, as a support act for another band they went to see, or even just that artist playing in the bar. Maybe they heard that artist on an independent radio station. But it would always be about the artist. Literally no one would have heard a band name and think “I will check out their website before I bother listening to any of their songs”. (Or at least if anyone does, they’re not the kind of people who give a crap about music so wouldnt be buying their albums nor going to their gigs anyway).
I’m not saying your advice is bad per se, just that you’re vastly over exaggerating the importance of a good website for people’s perceptions of an artist.
Maybe I am not thinking through this enough but... why? Social media accounts and artist pages on streaming platforms showing up at the top of Google search is probably more important than their website.
Yep. When was the last time you went to a bands actual website to find info? Spotify has tour dates. You’d follow them on Instagram, they share music and dates, links to merch stores there. The website itself means pretty much nothing these days so you can take some creative angles. So many smaller bands I’ve worked with who are growing don’t have one.
Surprisingly, I am listening the latest Rolling Stone album right now and I wanted to check if they will tour our town. I went to their web site to check it and to my surprise I was not able to find any tour info there.
Most ways of putting up a conventional website don't make updates easy, unless you buy into some whole system, or pay someone. If Sheets is familiar and works, why not?
Arguably the fact that the website is more likely to be accurate and up to date this way makes it more user friendly.
Funny related story: I have nearly 2 decades professional webdev experience, including a cumulative decade at a FAANG and a "decacorn". My HOA was looking for someone to take over maintenance of their website for events and photos and other super basic stuff. I volunteered along with some other lady who only had experience maintaining her church website in WordPress.
The board chose the other lady without even talking to me "because she had deeper WordPress experience."
The site still looks and functions like it's 1998 /shrug
I saw them live last year and they had the stage lights off the whole show, you couldn't see them at all. They closed with their big hit and played the Beavis and Butthead clip making fun of it first. I think they're a little (playfully) antagonistic
A lot of people say that about a lot of art. 'Terrible ideas' can be very, very dope though. IMO mapping their primary domain to a fuckin' Google Sheet is banger hah.
> Artist websites (IMO) have an actual purpose, keeping your audience updated with tour dates for one.
Those are there, though? Also Google returns the 29 tour tracking/ticketing platforms in their trailing results behind the primary domain. I think the fans will be ok...
> Agents and venues looking for promo pictures.
> Festival planners looking to get a sense of your style etc.
Bruh it's Portugal. The Man. There is one agent (theirs) and venues/festival "planners" (???) aren't "looking" for promo photos – they're delivered by their agent and/or management with restrictions, guidelines, and approval for promotional use only. They can't just pull random media off the internet for promo.
Nobody is trying to determine their "style". That's been clearly defined for a minute (decade+) now. If anything these people are selling PTM, not the other way around.
> My bet would be that they started tracking tour dates on a Google Sheet and decided to share it to a tour manager and here we are...
I can guarantee you that's incorrect. You don't think they plot & plan & intelligently deploy their entire, well... everything? For months on months before we see it? Nobody fumbled about, tweaked the layout & styling, and toggled the Share function on the Google Sheet organically haha.
> homepages of artists like Radiohead were quite avant-garde and you’d be lucky to learn anything really
You can shorten this by eliminating the "of artists like Radiohead" from the phrasing, and it will still be true of many businesses.
You'd think that when an organization shells out money to someone so they'll grab a domain name and set up a site for them, it would be for the org to have a depository for their content just like TBL intended—and they can piggyback off the ubiquity of the Web so those resources are retrievable/accessible with pretty low friction. Weirdly, a whole industry of people specializing in e.g. Wordpress or CSS-framework-du-jour have managed to pull some sleight of hand so that the world at large doesn't have expectations that are anything like that in mind and instead thinks that the purpose should rather be little more than something like a visually stunning brochure (or billboard) that's already out of date the day it's published—and everything the business relies on to actually operate and communicate will happen either through Facebook or is created in a facsimile of a 90s-style office suite and gets shuttled around via email or Google Drive (or simply never leaves the machine where it was created).
Pretty weird fuckin' milieu (and expensive), if we're being frank.
Actually works well to get the points across (on desktop, at least), and is interesting from an artistic perspective. I enjoy it as an interesting anecdote, but it does make for a comparatively miserable browsing experience!
Now might be a good time to mention the band Vulfpeck's website, which is refreshingly stripped-down and no more flashy in it's design than Craigslist. Aside from it's custom typeface: https://www.vulfpeck.com/
The site is a little light on content right now because there's not much going on with the band, but going back in time you can see how crisp and functional the entire thing is, even when loaded with information: https://web.archive.org/web/20200417092603/https://vulfpeck....
With slightly larger granularity, and for somewhat more mundane purposes, it's also a neat way to present QR codes. Especially good for QR codes via email, since no attachment is required and almost every client supports tables.
Spreadsheets: the original no-code platform. I like it. Infinitely scalable, easy to update. Most of the time when I go to an artist's site it's to find tour dates or merch. This does both okay.
I’ve seen workflows with data chunked out into multiple excel files because the results exceeded the row limit (4 million?) Going through all that by hand was a pain, and it took hours to go from a flat file format to spreadsheets. Parquet took this down to seconds, and provided a rich data analysis API.
Spreadsheets scale for small to medium-ish workflows and are very much a drag for anything remotely “big.”
A fun funky idea. Sad I can’t think of a ton of HN worthy ideas of musical acts making newsworthy tech-empowered quirky choices. The last thing that comes to mind is Radiohead making In Rainbows pay-what-you-want.
This is why I was never interested in U2. I'm sure they made great stuff before I was born, but my primary exposure to them as a kid was Apple iPod ads. It turned me off them and I have ignored their existence ever since.
A few years back I was in a tech interview in San Francisco, and after the fact I hung out with other candidates in the city. One of them was from Canada and told us he played in a band. This is the band! Happy to see this project still going strong and gaining traction!
There’s a difference between headlines and page titles imo. A (good) headline already tells you what’s interesting about a link, whereas a page title may or may not.
I also have an iOS published app that has a Google Sheets “backend”: https://subsol.one
It’s an app for finding parties and festivals in Romania, and the sheets choice makes it super easy for my brother and his friends to add parties to the app.
I thought about adding a “real” database and tried some apps/frontends for them, but nothing made it easy enough to update and insert rows for non technical people.
I figured I could just download and cache the Sheets CSV, and use that for the database.
Sameish here. I made hundreds of flashcards and other "matrixes" of data, this is pulled each time I build the app, which then converts the csv to json and stored in the app.
I also write articles in Sketch, because the app is heavy on illustrations. Using sketch allows me to draw the images directly while writing the articles. It is then sliced and exported into the app through a custom plugin.
Websites or apps backed by a sheet or some other minimalist setup are fairly common. What's noteworthy about the submission is that the website is a sheet, not a layer to render info from one.
You can easily turn a spreadsheet into a small CRUD database with HTTP API using Google Apps Script. I've shared an example a few years ago: https://spreadapi.roombelt.com/setup.
I'm not sure I understand this comment. The parent asked whether SQLPage could be used to update data in the database after inserting it. I answered that yes, it could.
The update form would look something like this:
select 'form' as component;
select 'event_name' as name,
(select name from events where id=$id) as value;
select 'event_date' as name, 'date' as type,
(select date from events where id=$id) as value;
select 'event_id' as name, $id as value, 'hidden' as type;
and the page processing the form would look like this:
update events set name=:event_name, date=:event_date where id=:event_id;
If what you are saying is that it's more complicated than a google sheet, then yes, there's no denying that. But it's also an order of magnitude less complicated than traditional web tech, and the result is a real website, not a google sheet.
It's a little bit more complicated to set up than a google sheet, but it's less complicated to use afterwards.
I didn’t realize it’s your project, so probably it hit personal, which wasn’t my intent. And I should have posted under the first comment to avoid making it even more confusing.
So I beg your pardon.
But what it really meant is that this sort of a technical solution may appeal to a developer, but not to regular users, not the ones who just updated spreadsheets for their website yesterday. Looking from that “mere mortal” point of view, and when it’s suggested by a person who isn’t yet known to be an author, in that context it feels like a 50% sarcasm and 50% our common geek stereotypes. I understand what SQLPage provides for a technical person, so please treat my comment as a joke which it is.
Thanks for the response, I was looking at your site from mobile earlier and it didn't jump out at me that it could also be used to edit data (tho I now see it mentioned clearly). Might be worth calling it out in a section as easy editing.
Btw how would you compare this to https://datasette.io/ which is the first thing that came to mind? Is yours a bit more developer oriented?
Hey, that's a good question, and the tools do have some overlap. Here is my (totally biased) comparison:
- datasette builds one single website and API, which you cannot customize, on top of a SQLite database. It is a little bit ugly, but very efficient to help you discover your own dataset, and make some quick data analysis. If you're concerned about restricting public access to your database, sharing it may not be ideal.
- SQLPage does not build anything for you by default. You need to write at least two or three SQL queries to make a useful website on top of your database. This requires you to already know the schema of the data you are working with. But this allows you to build visualisations of your data that look the way you want. While Datasette mainly offers tables, SQLPage provides forms, graphs, lists, tables, data cards, and more. The results tend to have a more polished and professional appearance, and your database remains private. Only the (parameterized) queries you create yourself can be executed by website visitors.
Furthermore, a significant distinction is that Datasette exclusively works with SQLite, while SQLPage can connect to SQLite, Postgres, MySQL, or SQL Server databases.
I haven't quite had a chance to set it up and play with it yet but one thing that I think is missing is that there is no clear way to write to it via api. I know it's not exactly the main purpose but I'd really like to be able to shoot data over from wherever and then let my friends/family easily see and edit it in the GUI.
Anyway it's a great looking tool and wishing you the best with it!
Thanks for building this, and for the sample code :)
Although what sheets excels at is batch editing and collaboration, which is really hard to get in an SQL frontend. My brother usually runs a Raycast workflow I wrote for him to extract a small number of party data as TSV which gets copied in clipboard. Then in sheets he can just paste that to get full rows and columns populated.
After that he and his friends start proof reading and cross referencing social media data for each row, and Sheets makes this super easy as they can see each row highlighted with each user’s color so they don’t step on each other’s toes.
Your solution is still very good for other use cases and I think I already have one in mind. My father always wanted to maintain a list of up-to-date prices for the vegetables that sell in my hometown’s large wholesale market.
This looks really good, but I had to pass on it because I couldn't find screenshots or, even better, a demo site. I think that would really help sell this.
There is also an official repl.it that you can fork to quickly try it online without having to download anything: https://replit.com/@pimaj62145/SQLPage
This is all good, but you're making a mistake I see many people make: If one person has this experience/questions (me), then many of your other visitors will. Answering here will answer my questions, but it won't answer everyone else's questions.
My recommendation would be to have a clear "see a demo" button, which leads to a website that showcases the most common elements I might want to have on such a page (a form, some graphs, etc), maybe with source code close by.
They’re not easy to create but side by side code/result demos like the ones I saw on https://imba.io/ make it very clear on what I’ll be getting into as a developer.
185 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadBut this is actually a terrible idea.
Artist websites (IMO) have an actual purpose, keeping your audience updated with tour dates for one. Agents and venues looking for promo pictures. Festival planners looking to get a sense of your style etc.,
Artist websites have a variety of audiences.
My bet would be that they started tracking tour dates on a Google Sheet and decided to share it to a tour manager and here we are...
Websites make it easy for you to control your promo material ( EPK).
I checked with the wayback machine, and it looks like my guess is correct. I clicked randomly into an archive a few years old, and here's 2016 website looking a lot more like what you describe http://web.archive.org/web/20160303191156/http://www.portuga... .
I guess an audience that you left out in your description is people appreciating the experience of looking at the website or the artist themselves wanting to make a statement. I think the band has thoroughly "made it" so to speak, and doesn't have to worry too much about most of what you mentioned. They do list tour dates in their google sheet and also can sell out pretty large venues easily, and I don't think there are any festival planners who don't know who Portugal, the Man who have any chance of nabbing them for their festival.
Portugal The Man is "made" but my concern was that the new bands that are still struggling to make it should not take inspiration from this and create a google sheets website. That would be terrible for their career.
For concerts, I tend to look for who is coming to venues near me, rather than looking at 200 band websites and hoping they are both on tour and near me.
Do most people go to the band’s actual site to learn this stuff?
But for artists who are not well known, a website can help make a great first impression.
I found this Apple Music for artists page a good intro on why promo/marketing materials are important.
https://artists.apple.com/support/1121-why-an-electronic-pre...
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Spotify would all rank much higher.
Even as someone who doesn’t do social media, I would still turn to YouTube and Spotify before I’d even bother looking for their band website. In fact the only time over ever visited an artists website in the last 10 years was to buy merch from their official stores.
Furthermore, people’s first impression of an artist is seeing them live at a festival, as a support act for another band they went to see, or even just that artist playing in the bar. Maybe they heard that artist on an independent radio station. But it would always be about the artist. Literally no one would have heard a band name and think “I will check out their website before I bother listening to any of their songs”. (Or at least if anyone does, they’re not the kind of people who give a crap about music so wouldnt be buying their albums nor going to their gigs anyway).
I’m not saying your advice is bad per se, just that you’re vastly over exaggerating the importance of a good website for people’s perceptions of an artist.
Not a counterpoint, just coincide I guess.
could you _get_ more indie than that?
You misspelled “pretentious”.
Arguably the fact that the website is more likely to be accurate and up to date this way makes it more user friendly.
The board chose the other lady without even talking to me "because she had deeper WordPress experience."
The site still looks and functions like it's 1998 /shrug
Hacker News isn’t exactly pretty, and I hope it never will be.
https://www.songkick.com/artists/400418-portugal-the-man
The "Track Artist" button at the top of the page will let you subscribe to all future dates inside a radius of your town.
Nightmare avoided. :)
All that stuff is here
A lot of people say that about a lot of art. 'Terrible ideas' can be very, very dope though. IMO mapping their primary domain to a fuckin' Google Sheet is banger hah.
> Artist websites (IMO) have an actual purpose, keeping your audience updated with tour dates for one.
Those are there, though? Also Google returns the 29 tour tracking/ticketing platforms in their trailing results behind the primary domain. I think the fans will be ok...
> Agents and venues looking for promo pictures.
> Festival planners looking to get a sense of your style etc.
Bruh it's Portugal. The Man. There is one agent (theirs) and venues/festival "planners" (???) aren't "looking" for promo photos – they're delivered by their agent and/or management with restrictions, guidelines, and approval for promotional use only. They can't just pull random media off the internet for promo.
Nobody is trying to determine their "style". That's been clearly defined for a minute (decade+) now. If anything these people are selling PTM, not the other way around.
> My bet would be that they started tracking tour dates on a Google Sheet and decided to share it to a tour manager and here we are...
I can guarantee you that's incorrect. You don't think they plot & plan & intelligently deploy their entire, well... everything? For months on months before we see it? Nobody fumbled about, tweaked the layout & styling, and toggled the Share function on the Google Sheet organically haha.
Back in the early 2000s homepages of artists like Radiohead were quite avant-garde and you’d be lucky to learn anything really.
You can shorten this by eliminating the "of artists like Radiohead" from the phrasing, and it will still be true of many businesses.
You'd think that when an organization shells out money to someone so they'll grab a domain name and set up a site for them, it would be for the org to have a depository for their content just like TBL intended—and they can piggyback off the ubiquity of the Web so those resources are retrievable/accessible with pretty low friction. Weirdly, a whole industry of people specializing in e.g. Wordpress or CSS-framework-du-jour have managed to pull some sleight of hand so that the world at large doesn't have expectations that are anything like that in mind and instead thinks that the purpose should rather be little more than something like a visually stunning brochure (or billboard) that's already out of date the day it's published—and everything the business relies on to actually operate and communicate will happen either through Facebook or is created in a facsimile of a 90s-style office suite and gets shuttled around via email or Google Drive (or simply never leaves the machine where it was created).
Pretty weird fuckin' milieu (and expensive), if we're being frank.
Website's definitely suffering in performance while having a grand total of .. 37 viewers.
The site is a little light on content right now because there's not much going on with the band, but going back in time you can see how crisp and functional the entire thing is, even when loaded with information: https://web.archive.org/web/20200417092603/https://vulfpeck....
https://nicolasjaar.net/
Until you look at the HTML source.
I’ve seen workflows with data chunked out into multiple excel files because the results exceeded the row limit (4 million?) Going through all that by hand was a pain, and it took hours to go from a flat file format to spreadsheets. Parquet took this down to seconds, and provided a rich data analysis API.
Spreadsheets scale for small to medium-ish workflows and are very much a drag for anything remotely “big.”
Vulfpeck fans won’t shut up about the fact that the band made their own font.
A few years back I was in a tech interview in San Francisco, and after the fact I hung out with other candidates in the city. One of them was from Canada and told us he played in a band. This is the band! Happy to see this project still going strong and gaining traction!
https://zackfox.com/
It’s an app for finding parties and festivals in Romania, and the sheets choice makes it super easy for my brother and his friends to add parties to the app.
I thought about adding a “real” database and tried some apps/frontends for them, but nothing made it easy enough to update and insert rows for non technical people.
I figured I could just download and cache the Sheets CSV, and use that for the database.
PS: the app is the one I had trouble getting published because the App Store reviewers deemed it“too simple”: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Dealing-with-App-Store-reject...
I also write articles in Sketch, because the app is heavy on illustrations. Using sketch allows me to draw the images directly while writing the articles. It is then sliced and exported into the app through a custom plugin.
It makes creating a small web form to feed your database as easy as
And creating an api on top of that db as simple as: [1] https://sql.ophir.dev/ [2] https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLPageThe update form would look something like this:
and the page processing the form would look like this: If what you are saying is that it's more complicated than a google sheet, then yes, there's no denying that. But it's also an order of magnitude less complicated than traditional web tech, and the result is a real website, not a google sheet.It's a little bit more complicated to set up than a google sheet, but it's less complicated to use afterwards.
So I beg your pardon.
But what it really meant is that this sort of a technical solution may appeal to a developer, but not to regular users, not the ones who just updated spreadsheets for their website yesterday. Looking from that “mere mortal” point of view, and when it’s suggested by a person who isn’t yet known to be an author, in that context it feels like a 50% sarcasm and 50% our common geek stereotypes. I understand what SQLPage provides for a technical person, so please treat my comment as a joke which it is.
Btw how would you compare this to https://datasette.io/ which is the first thing that came to mind? Is yours a bit more developer oriented?
- datasette builds one single website and API, which you cannot customize, on top of a SQLite database. It is a little bit ugly, but very efficient to help you discover your own dataset, and make some quick data analysis. If you're concerned about restricting public access to your database, sharing it may not be ideal.
- SQLPage does not build anything for you by default. You need to write at least two or three SQL queries to make a useful website on top of your database. This requires you to already know the schema of the data you are working with. But this allows you to build visualisations of your data that look the way you want. While Datasette mainly offers tables, SQLPage provides forms, graphs, lists, tables, data cards, and more. The results tend to have a more polished and professional appearance, and your database remains private. Only the (parameterized) queries you create yourself can be executed by website visitors.
Furthermore, a significant distinction is that Datasette exclusively works with SQLite, while SQLPage can connect to SQLite, Postgres, MySQL, or SQL Server databases.
Anyway it's a great looking tool and wishing you the best with it!
Although what sheets excels at is batch editing and collaboration, which is really hard to get in an SQL frontend. My brother usually runs a Raycast workflow I wrote for him to extract a small number of party data as TSV which gets copied in clipboard. Then in sheets he can just paste that to get full rows and columns populated.
After that he and his friends start proof reading and cross referencing social media data for each row, and Sheets makes this super easy as they can see each row highlighted with each user’s color so they don’t step on each other’s toes.
Your solution is still very good for other use cases and I think I already have one in mind. My father always wanted to maintain a list of up-to-date prices for the vegetables that sell in my hometown’s large wholesale market.
well played
The sql source code for it is here: https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage/tree/main/examples/offici...
The site also links to this little collaborative game written in SQLPage: https://conundrum.ophir.dev/
The github README has code snippets and associated screenshots: https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage#examples
There is also an official repl.it that you can fork to quickly try it online without having to download anything: https://replit.com/@pimaj62145/SQLPage
And SQLPage cloud is coming: https://sql.ophir.dev/your-first-sql-website/hosted.sql
My recommendation would be to have a clear "see a demo" button, which leads to a website that showcases the most common elements I might want to have on such a page (a form, some graphs, etc), maybe with source code close by.
They’re not easy to create but side by side code/result demos like the ones I saw on https://imba.io/ make it very clear on what I’ll be getting into as a developer.
Realtors and doctors, mostly.
https://www.thestrokes.com/