One of the on-going jokes amoungst my friends is that the ‘has to be’ at least one festival every weekend here in Rochester, NY. So, the other day I sat down and tried to find every one that, at least, mentioned ‘fest’ or ‘festival’ in its name. Now, this is good, however kind of useless only providing links to them from my web site. I re-visited one of my favorite web sites Upcoming.org and proceeded to add all the festivals (that I found) into there. Links to those pages can be found here:

Rochester Summer Festivals

• Rochester International Film Festival
• Lilac Festival
• East End Night Life Festival (2,3)
• Rochester International Jazz Festival (Posted by Patrick Haney)
• Maplewood Rose Festival
• Rochester Harbor and Carousel Festival
• Corn Hill Arts Festival
• Rochester MusicFest
• Park Avenue Summer Art Fest
• Brockport Summer Art Festival
• Clothesline Festival
• ImageOut – The Rochester Lesbian & Gay Film Festival
• High Falls Film Festival

More Rochester Events

• http://www.artsrochester.org/
• http://www.visitrochester.com/
• http://www.cityofrochester.gov/index.cfm?id=483

While I was doing this, however, I realized that the whole process of adding events was really slow and annoying. This gave me a chance to explore a tool that I had been meaning to use: Webscrape. It’s an easy-to-use Perl/XPath web page scraper that really speeds up the whole process. This led me to create two scraping applications for people to use:

Rochester Event Scrapers

• Eastman House Event Scraper
• Bug Jar Event Scraper

I will probably do a separate post dedicated to Webscrape here soon, as I really enjoyed using it.