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tourb.us is an application that I have thought about writing myself on several occasions, obviously to no avail. We are big music buffs here at GANB (last.fm feed in footer) and are surprised a service like this has yet to be implemented. Even better, they did it exactly how I would have done it. Although the service integration is an integral feature I had not thought of. More on that…

What is tourb.us?

tourb.us is one a long overdue web service for finding live music. One of the biggest deterrents for me going to shows is not knowing that the show is actually happening. I do not like having to search for a band to find out if they are coming to Des Moines, IA. The biggest problem is they likely are not coming near me (DSM is not the biggest attraction for bands) so I just wasted time searching.

Why should I use it?

Considering 20% of the American public watches live music it’s safe to assume if you are reading this you enjoy it. tourb.us makes the information you want about live music findable and easily retrievable. If you are a last.fm user, tourb.us requires no data input and finds out your favorite bands. Once complete it will begin to aggregate tour information to you, in your area. tourb.us can be use as a transparent web service too. By automating both ends of the user experience you are delivered relevant information.

q&a with the guys behind tourb.us

After receiving an excellent response for my request for the inclusion of Des Moines, I asked Gary and Mike some questions about why they built it and the process behind it.

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q) when and how did you come up with the idea for tourb.us?

The idea for tourb.us came from ’scratching an itch’ of our own. We were tired of hearing about good shows too late. We were inspired to work on it after attending Y Combinator’s Startup School last fall, and the site has just grown since then.

q) is this your first RoR application?

Yes, we learned RoR as we developed tourb.us and have really enjoyed using it.

q) how were your experiences developing in that framework? compared to alternatives…?

Developing with RoR is a huge breath of fresh air compared to the java frameworks we had been using before. Even if you factor in the learning curve of rails and ruby, we were able to build the site much faster than we would have been able to in any other framework we knew about at the time. Plus, I think we had a lot more fun doing it.

q) were there any surprises as you were developing?

There were very few negative surprises while developing. Ruby doesn’t work as well as we’d like on Windows (our development platform), but that has been an easy problem to overcome. Most of the time we would be surprised at just how easy rails made common tasks.

q) after a brief look at your source, i noticed you are using popular javascript libraries, such as prototype, scriptaculous, and rico. what are you using these for and did you find them useful?

We have a few ajax-heavy pages that make good use of RoR’s built-in support for prototype and scriptaculous. We use them for simple things like ajaxy-autocomplete text boxes as well as more complex screens like adding a new show. We’re using rico because it lets us add those nice rounded corners without opening up photoshop.

q) when designing (frontend) the application, what parts did you concentrate most on? i read you had trouble with safari and tooltips - what was the problem?

For the frontend we started with the typical questions around information flow and what are the different screens, and then as we went along tried to improve the layout of the individual pages. We tend to work mostly breadth-first, building some kind of skeleton
pages and then cleaning them up.

We ran into one bug with a tooltip javascript library we use that broke all form submission on Safari. It was an easy fix (that we blogged about) but it gave us a better education of the javascript event model and the joys of supporting several browsers.

q) the main options of shows/bands/venues is very prominent. what was your goal with that style of navigation?

We wanted to make sure it was obvious that our site was all about live music. The only things that really matter are what shows you want to see, the bands that are playing and where they’re playing.

q) the design of the main page is great, giving users all available options along with showing featured data. was that your goal in the design?

We tend to like clean straightforward UI design, and neither of us are very artistic so we aren’t tempted to over-design. The goal of the front page was to make the site useful and accessible without having to search or click around.

q) so are you two a company? or a couple of guys building a web app? how did you start? who does what?

Right now we’re just a couple of guys building a web app that we wanted to use for ourselves. We’ve known each other for a long time and it was very natural to start working
together on a project that we were both passionate about. We split the development, support and PR duties pretty evenly, although you can tell that Mike is the more prolific blogger.

q) do you have a business model / revenue model or did you build it for fun and enjoying the ride?

We’re definitely building tourb.us for fun, but we have plenty of ideas for how it can generate revenue in the future.

tourb.us | Find Local, Live Music
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technorati tags:tourbus, music, search, rss, lastfm, concert

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