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%.

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!