Introducing Custom Listings
Birmingham is a big place and there’s a lot going on. We do our best to make it easy to find things you want to go to but sometimes the sheer volume of events is overwhelming. Take this Saturday where we currently have 96 events listed. That’s a lot to wade through.
New Live Brum has improved matters. You can now filter those events by genre by clicking on the tabs at the top of the listings.
But we wanted to do better than that. So, behold, Live Brum Custom Listings. There’s a few examples on that page so you can see the sort of thing that is possible but the fun really starts when you make your own.
Make your own
Just sign up for an account and hit the big green ‘new custom listings’ button.
You’ll see a form with a few options. There are some guidance notes down the side to help you but in essence you can do one or both of the following:
Set a start point and distance
With these set, Live Brum will generate listings for events within x miles of your start point. Want to see everything within half a mile of home? Just enter your postcode and 0.5 as the distance and, bingo, your own especially local listings.
Set a search term
Got a favourite band you want to keep track of? Maybe you care about a music genre that doesn’t quite fit our standard categorisations. No problem. Just set up a custom listing with an event query and we’ll give you back results that match. Our example Reggae listings are a demonstration of this.
Combine the two
If you just want Reggae (or anything) within a certain distance then feel free to set both of the options above. Just don’t expect to get vast numbers of events back.
By Genre
Every custom listing includes a genre filter, just like other pages on the site.
Feeds
Every custom listing includes an RSS feed if you care about such things.
Sharing
All custom listings are public. If you make a new custom listing it can be viewed by anyone. However, unless you tick the ‘share’ option then telling people about your new listings is up to you. If you do tick the ‘share’ option then your listings will show up on our custom listings page for everyone to see. We’ll also put links to the most popular shared custom listings on the home page.
Experimental
While they seem to work ok, we do regard custom listings as ‘experimental’ at the moment. We’re still working on improving them. If you encounter problems then do, please, let us know.
Have fun.