Thank You!

First a big thanks goes out to the gamers who are helping offset the hosting costs for this site. I used to host this in my basement but the site would go down every time we lost power to an Indiana thunderstorm. It's now hosted in the Amazon cloud, where the uptime is above 99%.

2024 Supporters (You all are starting early this year. Thank you!)

Andrew Greene
Sean Rawley
Paul Dawson
Matthew Williams

2023 Supporters

Robert Anderson
Andrew Greene
Derrick Wente
Jennifer Steinhurst
Jennifer Dubeansky
Robert Kaye
Patrick Ellis
Tracy Landrum
Donald Roeber
Brian Baker
Stuart Greenwell
Michelle Knee
George Fisher
Miranda Henstrom
Fred Kessler
David Christian
Yasmin Menchaca
Paul Dawson
Mark Maruska
Patrick McGinness
Joshua Lohrman
Quynh-Chi Nguyen
Cordelia Geiken
Dennis Crissman
Andrew Greene
Matthew Williams
Andrew Greene
John Hesch

2022 Supporters

Paul Dawson
Robert Anderson
Patrick Ellis
Donald Stephens
Stuart Greenwall
Tracy Landrum
Daniel Piorkowski
Ian Wolfgang
Fred Kessler
John Brown
Norman Dean
Brian Baker
Matthew Williams
Brad Grosse
Jennifer Steinhurst

2021 Supporters

Robert Anderson
Kenneth Winland
Brian Baker
LawfulDice.com
Tracy Landrum
Daniel Aiello
Paul Dawson
Sandra McGeorge
Donald Stephens
Fred Kessler
Bradley Rasmussen
Darren Franzen
Steven Swan
Matthew Williams

2020 Supporters

LawfulDice.com
Tracy Landrum
Jennifer Steinhurst
Paul Dawson
Alan Schirtzinger
Ginger Ludden
Fred Kessler
Christine Sizemore

2019 Supporters

Stephen Wittenberg
Paul Dawson
Robert Anderson
Tracy Landrum
Stuart Greenwell
LivingDice.com
Sean Gray
Heather Bereskin
Fred Kessler
Alexander Duplessie
Jennifer Steinhurst
Norman Dean
Patrick Ellis
Yves Frechette
James Randall
Timothy Vanderwall
Joseph Knight
Justin Radziewicz
Michael Raichelson
Daniel Aiello
William Walters
David Campbell
Ginger Ludden
James Bohnert
Jeffrey Young
Technical Gravy LLC
Melodie Hardwick

2018 Supporters

Paul Dawson
Jim Randall
Kenneth Winland
Patrick Ellis
Robert Anderson
Whitney Falba
Norman Dean
LivingDice.com
Alexander Duplessie
David Gripp
Tracey Lester
Philip Schifano
Fred Kessler
Justin Radziewicz

2017 Supporters

Patrick Ellis
Brandon Born
Stephen Wittenberg
Brian Baker
Daniel Henson

2016 Supporters

Robert Anderson
Norman Cates
Jesse Carlucci
R Newell
Philip Schifano

An Acknowledgment

I'd like to give kudos to Alan De Smet for his excellent work on the original (at least to me) 3rd party Gen Con Event viewing tool at his highprogrammer.com site. I attended my first Gen Con in 2011, found out about his tool through the forums, and used it obsessively to track the history of new events as they were added to the system. So thanks Alan for the work you've done, and inspiring my effort here.

Why this web app?

The reasons are threefold:

  1. I'm a programmer, and wanted a pet project to explore some new technologies that are interesting to me.
  2. For myself personally, I wanted a more mobile/tablet friendly experience for viewing Gen Con events.
  3. As mentioned previously, I'm obsessed with tracking additions to the event database. When the event listing is first published, I will go through the entire catalog from start to finish. For 2011, I used the highprogrammer "Recent Changes > See updates for other days" function to make sure I didn't miss any additions. Sometime last year that stopped functioning, and still remains empty today. The Changes menu above accomplishes this task for me now.

How often does it update?

The app pulls updates every six hours, synced to the schedule that the events.csv updates on the Gen Con downloads page. You can always see the date and time of the most recently processed .csv at the bottom of the Home page.

Only event additions or deletions get added to the Changes menu. Updates to events, including changes to the number of tickets available, are processed with each update to the events.csv, but will not be reflected in the Changes menu.

What's to come?

At the moment, the app satisfies my personal requirements for building it, which I've listed above. However as I get free time, I'd like to add more functionality to it. If you'd like to comment, or there's something you'd like to see included, please feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]. Full disclosure: I can't make any guarantees about what or when additional functionality might get added; this app is at the mercy of my limited free time!