TBShows

A Brief History

TBShows has been in existence since approximately April 1st, 2004. It's grown from a tiny little blue website that contained nothing but show listings, into what it is today; a database of both upcoming & past shows, with band information & links, along with venue information & maps.

We've lived through a complete server crash, in which we lost approximately a year and a half worth of data. Everything contained on the site dates from approximately the month of August in 2005. Prior to the server crash, there were an additional 500 pictures, along with 200+ archived listings. Sadly, these were unrecoverable due to the nature of the crash, though measures have been put in place to prevent this from ever happening again.

TBShows thrives on the fact that anyone can add to it. Anyone can send in an error report about an existing show (it's encouraged!), or add a show that isn't on the site. Bands can submit & update their information at any time, and anyone can upload pictures they've taken from a show or posters they've made themselves.

All of this is put in place for one reason, which is the reason the site exists: To promote the Thunder Bay Music Scene.

Currently, the site gets around 3000 5000 unique visitors and approximately 50,000 60,000 pageviews monthly. As the archived pictures, posters, and shows continues to increase (and more bands keep coming to town), this traffic is expected to continue growing, hopefully attracting new faces to shows & events around town, and inspiring them to also visit this website & tell their friends about it. As you can see, this is a circular process.

Who runs this?

TBShows is maintained by several people. There's a team of four-ish people who do all the administrative work (approving shows, updating shows, etc), while the moose (visible on the Forums under the creative alias "Admin") takes care of all most of the actual coding of the site. If you'd like to contact any of us, you can use either the contact page, or send any of us a private message on the forums. Anyone who is a moderator/site admin on the forums also takes care of the main site, though if it's a technical question, you'd best be advised to use the contact form.

Dates of minor importance

• April 1st, 2004: TBShows.com registered
• August-ish 2005: All data lost in horrible server crash; all data starts from about here thusly.
• February 28th, 2006: 100th poster uploaded
• October 12th, 2007: We realize we stopped keeping track of dates of minor importance quite some time ago.

Technical Information

TBShows couldn't exist without open source software. Honestly. It's coded entirely in PHP, mostly from scratch, though there are some acknowledgements to be made. In no particular order..

• PHP - The language that lets the whole damn place work.
• MarkDown - MarkDown is used extensively around the site for text formatting
• script.aculo.us - If it weren't for this helpful library, you'd have some pretty boring navbars and no fancy psuedo-animations
• Anyone who's ever contributed any functions/comments to php.net's comments section; honestly, there's dozens of tiny functions I've taken and slightly modded to fit with the site, so thank you to anyone who's ever contributed there.