What's Good Napa

Sources

Where the listings come from

Everything on this site is read off something that was already public: a venue's own events page, a calendar feed anyone can subscribe to, a public Instagram account, a newsletter we joined, or a note a reader sent in. Every event links back to the place we read it. This is the whole list, so you can check any of it.

41 sources are active today. 38 of them have put at least one published event on the site. The other 3 have carried nothing so far, and they are on the list anyway.

This page is built from the crawl each time it loads. Nothing on it is typed in by hand, so it cannot quietly go out of date.

Venue and event pages

Pages we read on a schedule, the same way you would if you checked them yourself. One of them.

Calendar and event feeds

Calendars a venue or a town publishes for anyone to read. When a venue offers one, this is the version of their listing we trust most. 8 of them.

Instagram accounts

Public accounts. Plenty of bars announce a night on Instagram and nowhere else. 32 of them.

How a venue gets on here

Somebody tells us where to look. Add a source: a venue's events page, a calendar feed, a public Instagram account. A person reads it, checks it is what it claims to be, and switches it on. Once it is on, it shows up on this page by itself.

We only read what is already public, we identify the crawler, we honour robots.txt, and we keep the request rate low. If a page asks not to be read, it is not read.

The small picture on each row is an account's own profile picture or a site's own favicon. We copy it once, keep it here, and serve it from this domain, so reading this page does not tell Instagram or anyone else that you were on it. Where there is no picture to copy, or nothing sharp enough at this size to be worth showing, the row carries its initials instead. That is every newsletter, every event a reader sent in, and every venue we have not yet found a page for.

What the numbers mean

Each row says how many published events came from that source and from nowhere else, and how many it is attached to altogether. So "10 of 12" means twelve events, ten of which we found in that one place and nowhere on the rest of the internet.

The first of those two numbers is the one worth reading. Some listings turn up on several calendars at once; others exist in one post by a venue and are findable nowhere else, and those are the reason this site is worth having. A source sitting at zero has given us nothing so far, and it stays on this list, because a page that dropped the quiet ones would be telling you a nicer story than the true one.

The date on each row is the last time we actually got something back, not the last time we tried. When a source is failing it says so in those words and keeps showing the older date it really last worked. A source we have never managed to read says that too.

Something here wrong, out of date, or listed that should not be? Write to [email protected].