Fringe Theatre Festival Visitor Schedule Optimiser

This is a tool to let you select shows and build your own schedule, while detecting conflicts (including walking times between shows). It's currently under construction (alpha version - features still being added), but you're welcome to give it a try. I've prefilled the list of events for the Ottawa Fringe Festival and Animation Festival, though you can do the same by copying their events-by-date web page and massaging the data enough to paste into the raw data box.

To use this, first click on the link for a festival from the list below, which will show you the Festival's raw data. You can ignore the raw data for now, just click the Update Schedule button to get to the friendlier editing display with all the checkboxes. More instructions are on the pages after that.

Useful features:

Grays out the unchoosen times for shows you have selected, so you can more easily fill time slots with shows you haven't seen.
Checks the time between shows to identify conflicts.
Factors in the walking time between venues to see if you have enough time to get to the next show. You can specify your walking speed too!
Statistics highlight problems with your schedule. Or let you brag about how many shows you've seen or hours you've watched.
There's a simple printable listing of your timetable. Suitable for, ummm, printing and taking with you.
You can save your choices on your computer for later editing; it's just simple text. Copying the editor web page and e-mailing it to yourself often works too.
Uses a darker gray (you can change the colours if you wish) for unchoosen times where the show is in the future. This lets you quickly pick an earlier time for shows you haven't seen yet; useful when frantically adjusting your schedule on the fly to accomodate a show your friends want to see.
Duplicate shows are shown with a number appended to the show name.

The nifty feature of this web app is that you can paste in the list of events for any festival into the text box (easiest if you obtain it in spreadsheet form). You can even make up your own web pages with pre-filled event listings (just have the FORM POST redirect to my web server), so that your friends can edit their own schedules to your festival. It also uses old (circa 1997) HTML 3.2 technology, so this should work even without Javascript.

If you have suggestions on how to improve it, please e-mail me at agmsmith@ncf.ca or use the Twitter hashtag #FFVSO to discuss it. Note that the core algorithim is running on my PC (www.agmsmith.ca), so it might be down once in a while for short periods of time while rebooting.

Current ideas and unimplemented features list:

Integrate with a mapping service, so it can show you the path to take between venues, as well as plotting venue latitude and longitude on a map.
Add server-side "include" files for the schedule data. That would cut down on the amount of data transmitted per update (no schedule data in the raw data text box) and would make it possible to change the schedule without requiring as much user action.
Rewrite it as a Java app, or AJAX or Javascript or ... running at the client side. Would give live feedback (totals at the top of the screen change immediately when you make a selection). Useful for automatically deselecting a show when you pick it at another time, and so on.
For bigger festivals, have options to hide shows (but always displays selected ones). Hide all but favourite shows. Hide all but favourite venues (add a checkbox for picking favourite venues). Hide all but favourite days (add checkboxes for days). Hide shows that overlap with the time used by selected shows. Hide everything, except selected shows (useful for removing shows).
Add calendar integration. Possibly spit out an iCalendar file with the schedule, but also import files so the user can work around their existing events. But how to do updates?
For on-demand streaming (OIAF2020), let the user change the start time for an event. Perhaps copy the on-demand entry as a kind of template to make the user's version of it.

Some of my personal schedules:

2024 Ottawa UnderCurrents Theatre Festival Schedule. A leisurely schedule, but I always make time for the New Play Tuesday.
2023 Ottawa Fringe Festival Schedule. Saw all but two shows; one cancelled, other was inappropriate for me.
2022 Ottawa Fringe Festival Schedule. Saw all but 1 of the shows, and that was because The F.R.A.N.C.I.S. Method performers got COVID and had to end their show early.
2020 Ottawa International Animation Festival Schedule.
2019 Ottawa Fringe Festival Schedule.
2018 Ottawa Fringe Festival Schedule.
2017 Ottawa Fringe Festival Schedule.
2016 Ottawa Fringe Festival Schedule.
2015 Ottawa Fringe Festival Schedule.
2014 OIAF.
2014 Ottawa Fringe Festival Schedule. I set a new personal high score with 53 shows seen, likely also the highest attendance in general (at least judging by Tweets from other theatre fanatics).

Source code is available at https://github.com/agmsmith/FFVSO if you want to see how it works or just use it on your own web server. If you want to, send me an e-mail with your FFVSO web site address and I'll post a list of installations.

- Alex