Over christmas I sorted out some old boxes from University and found all the paper ticket stubs for gigs from 2002 to 2005. That’s some meaty data I didn’t want to lose, I copied it to a spreadsheet with plans to import it in to the Last.fm events system (where I track all my current gig habbits).
Unfortunately the add events workflow is a real pain for adding more than one event at once, let alone the 50 I had. In the future we hope to add better support for adding multiple events, either with a new tool (aimed at promoters) or creating an event.add API method (and let someone else build it), but in the meantime I wanted a quick hack solution to speed things up.
Seeing as I had all my data in CSV already, the simplest approach is to generate URLs that pre-fill the “Add Event” form data and let you skip to the last step. Note; We use one-time form tokens to prevent XSRF attacks, so you can’t just submit the form a script. All the fields can be passed as GET variables to prefill, here are the query param names you’ll need to do this:
- type
- “gig” or “festival”
- startday
- 2 digit day, eg 03
- startmonth
- 2 digit month, eg 11
- startyear
- 4 digit year, eg 2002
- starttime
- 24 hour time separated by a colon, eg 20:00
- venueid
- The Last.fm venue id, you can find this in the venue URL
- festivalName
- Confusingly this is just event name/title, not festival specific
- artistNames
- Multiple artist names, specified as an array, eg artistNames[]=Blur&artistNames[]=Radiohead&artistNames[]=Pulp
So a complete example looks like:
http://last.fm/events/add?type=gig&artistNames[]=Sparta&startday=04&startmonth=10&startyear=2005&starttime=20:00&venueid=8777858&festivalName=
If you have your events in a structured format then it’s easy to build a quick script to generate these links and really reduce the time needed to add events. Far far from ideal I know (and I’m a bit embarrassed to post it) but it might save you some time. I promise to build event.add to the API soon.
