Culture Night is an annual night in Ireland offering free access to cultural activities, performances, and venues across the country to celebrate Irish arts and heritage.

This year there was 1555 events all around the country. However, the website does a terrible job at event discovery.

Sub-par event discovery

Discovery of events is a pain, one example is the Start Times filter only returns events that start at the exact time you selected, so if you select 18:30 you will ony see the one event that started at that time, instead of the large number of events that run all night long but start at 18:00. So if you plan to start you night later in the evening you can't figure out which events are available without having to navigate through all the events.

Another issue is the locations filter contains all the locations where an event is occurring, but also wider locations, but also locations with no events. To add to the confusion in Dublin City Center there are 7 event quarters whose boundaries are unclear.

The solution

I was reminded of Culture Night two days before it occurred this year and when I started to plan my night I ran into all of the issues above. So instead of coming up with a plan I decided to come up with a solution. Luckily it was Hackathon week in Microsoft so I could focus on this without any detriment to my day job.

The biggest issue is that there is no map available of the events. If one was able to zoom into the area you are planning to attend you could easily see what was happening nearby, this could lead to more spontaneity and variety in the events one attends.

Scraping the site

Firstly, I needed to scrape the Culture Night website. To do this I created a Playwright script that would scrape the events from the search pages, navigate to the next page of the search results, and repeat that until 66 results pages were scraped. This provided me the title of the event and the start and finish time but to get more details information including the address I needed to open each event page in turn.

In each event page I scraped everything I could, including the full address, the description along with anything else of note.

At this point I had a json file of all the event details, but for a map to be useful I needed a latitude and longitude so I could place a pin on the map.

To get a lat/lng for each event I took the full address and passed it into a Geocoding API that returns the co-ordinates. I stored this data alongside the events in the json. One issue I faced was that some of the events had poor address data so I had to manually find the co-ordinates, but this was only about 10 or so events so it wasn't an issue.

If I was able to control the applications for Culture Night/The Arts Council, I would have better supports in place to ensure the data provided is of higher quality.

Making a map

I've been using Next.js for a number of projects recently, although it appears to be rarely the right choice for what I am trying to do, but I was on a tight schedule so I plowed on.

I used React Leaflet (which uses Leaflet) to display my map.

I imported all my events, and placed all 1555 markers on the map at once. Thankfully, react-leaflet-cluster was able to handle them all perfectly and grouped them when a number of events were nearby.

Filtering culture

Next I added some quick filters. The most important one was to be able to filter based on time. I wanted the user to be able to put in the start and end time of their plans and my map would return all the events that are happening at any part of that window.

Future versions

At about 4pm on the Friday of Culture Night, I had everything in a state that I was happy to share, but there a number of things I would like to improve for the future version.

Firstly, I'd love to have improved filters, the approach at the moment is rudimentary and uses the simple JavaScript filter, but I'd like to include a powerful free form search box. I'd also like to list all the events in a side panel that allows for scrolling of all the events, kinda like on Airbnb with their accommodation. I'd move away from the Open Street Map tile server, to something that provided an SLA, and perhaps provided a dark them to fit with theme, but for now OSM is free which is hard to beat on a cost basis. Finally, my strings are lacking. I know what "Start Time" filters, but I'd like to provide more details so that people can make the most of the site.

Feel free to take a look at the app and let me know what you think.

True culture

My Culture Night recommendation is Black Church Print Studio, it's a fantastic tour of 4 stories of all different kinds of print making. I have done the tour numerous times and I always enjoy it.

And in the end of all this effort what did I do for Culture Night this year? I went to one venue, the Revenue Museum, and then I went to the pub with some friends. It was the perfect Culture Night.

If you have contacts in the Arts Council I'd love to talk to them about my thoughts on improvements they could make to their site.

TL;DR

I created a Luas App that does all the things I wanted it to do. You can find it on https://anotherluasapp.com/

I started writing this a while ago, but I am only getting around to publishing it now. I use Transit App for my transit forecasting needs.

In March 2020, at the start of Lockdown 1.0 I wanted to take a look at React. So in the effort to find something interesting to do I dipped into my never ending well of Transport in Dublin and decided to create a app that would provide all the features I felt was missing from other applications.

The before times

Previously, my default Luas app was Luas at a Glance by Aaron Hastings. It's a fast, simple application that I learned when writing this post is open source.

The main issue I missed from Luas at a Glance was the lack of operating hours. When I was out and planning to get the last Luas home I would use the Luas website to remind myself what time I would need to leave at.

What I wanted

So that was the first thing I wanted, operating hours.

It's got some nice features that I'm proud of:
🕦 First and last tram information
⚡ Super speedy
⭐ Favourite stations
🔄️ Automatic forecast refresh
🚲 Station facilities
⛔ No ads
🇮🇪 Ar fáil i nGaeilge

Introducing Another Luas App.

How it works

The app is a React app (available on GitHub) hosted on Azure, and calls an Azure Function (also available on GitHub) to get the upcoming forecast. This Azure function calls the publicly available Luas forecast API, translates that response from XML to JSON, and enriches the data with station facilities and operation hours.

Give it a go and let me know what you think.

From the end of January 2022, an Enterprise License is required to use Docker Desktop. It remains free for small businesses (fewer than 250 employees AND less than $10 million in annual revenue), personal use, education, and non-commercial open source projects.

As an alternative I looked at using Podman on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.

Setting up WSL 2

• Install WSL 2
  • Open cmd as Administrator
  • Run wsl --install
  • Restart Windows
• Install a Linux Distro
  • Open cmd as Administrator
  • Run wsl --install -d Ubuntu to install Ubuntu LTS
  • Restart Windows

Installing Podman

• Add a Repositories which has Podman available
  • If you are using Ubuntu 20.10 or newer Podman is available in the official repositories. And skip to the next part of adding a repository to find Podman.
  • If you are running 20.04 (current LTS), or newer run the below.
  • Open an Ubuntu terminal window, and run the below.

    . /etc/os-release
    echo "deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/libcontainers:/stable/xUbuntu_${VERSION_ID}/ /" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/devel:kubic:libcontainers:stable.list
    curl -L "https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/libcontainers:/stable/xUbuntu_${VERSION_ID}/Release.key" | sudo apt-key add -

• Install Podman
  • In an Ubuntu terminal, run the below

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get -y upgrade
    sudo apt-get -y install podman

Using Podman

Podman has a similar CLI to docker, so most, if not all, commands that you use in Docker are supported by Podman.

A full list of supported commands can be found on the Podman documentations

I have a dataset of real time information for the Luas since January 19th, 2020. Uncompressed it's about 10GB in size, but you can download a ~500MB zip of it from OneDrive.

File Content

01/19/2020 22:50:02	Red	TPT	Outbound to	TAL	Due in	9	Red Line services operating normally
01/19/2020 22:50:02	Red	TPT	Outbound to	SAG	Due in	14	Red Line services operating normally
01/19/2020 22:49:59	Red	SDK	Inbound to	TPT	Due in	11	Red Line services operating normally
01/19/2020 22:49:59	Red	SDK	Inbound to	TPT	Due in	16	Red Line services operating normally
01/19/2020 22:49:59	Red	SDK	Outbound to	TAL	Due in	10	Red Line services operating normally
01/19/2020 22:49:59	Red	SDK	Outbound to	SAG	Due in	15	Red Line services operating normally
01/19/2020 22:50:02	Red	MYS	Inbound to	TPT	Due in	9	Red Line services operating normally
01/19/2020 22:50:02	Red	MYS	Inbound to	TPT	Due in	15	Red Line services operating normally
01/19/2020 22:50:02	Red	MYS	Outbound to	TAL	Due in	0	Red Line services operating normally
01/19/2020 22:50:02	Red	MYS	Outbound to	TAL	Due in	12	Red Line services operating normally

Why?

I do not know. I was working on a dotnet Luas API at the time at this was something easy to do. I figured, by the time I got to it I might have a use case for it, maybe some sort of forecast planning.

How does it work?

On my server I run a cron job every two minutes, that runs a simple application that hits every stations endpoint, and appends the results to a never ending TSV. Every so often I manually download that TSV to store it locally.

Do you have the code?

Unfortunately, I seem to have misplace the code. I do have the compiled dotnet code on the server, but I have not got the source code.

Do you have a license for this data?

While I haven't attached a license to this code, you are more than welcome to use this data as you see fit.
If you do use it, I would love to know what you do with it (let me know on Twitter).
If you need a more proper license please let me know and I can research it a bit more.