An end to updates
There’s a little under a week left of the Festival, so I’m not going to add any more features to the site (this year, anyway). I have, however made a couple of lists that might be useful: this year’s Fringe First Award Winners and shows that the Guardian gave four or five stars. I might make others, in which case I will update this post.
Enjoy the last week! The best things I have seen are probably Nowhere and Slugs.
Star ratings
There’s star ratings now! Rate away!
nb Your ratings will be visible to your followers, but only your followers.
Fringe of Colour
There’s an excellent initiative called Fringe of Colour that keeps a database of of shows by Artists of Colour at the Edinburgh festivals. I’ve made a list of those shows, so you can go and browse, but I've also added a filter button to the top of the events table that will let you filter any other list of events to just those that feature in the Fringe of Colour database.
A space for venues
Straightforward one: venues now link to a venue view (or if you want, there's a list of all venues). So if you want to see everything that’s on at Summerhall or at Lighthouse Bookshop, you can.
A quick note to say…
… that there are notes now! You can add a note to any event. It can either be private, or visible to people who follow you, or visible to mutuals.
(There’s no public setting because I’m more interested in having the site be a way to share with friends than a place for public reviews. Open to opinions on this, as with all things – alan@festies.co.uk – but that’s how it’s going to be, this year anyway.)
It’s getting late in the Festival to add new features. I’m still tempted to put in star ratings and optional performance times for bookmarked shows (so you can say which specific performance you’re going to/interested in). That will either be this week, or it’ll be 2026…
Now there are lists!
Since the site went up profiles have had a broken little 'lists' link. I didn't want to remove it, because I really wanted user-created lists of events to be a thing. And now they are! Or they can be!
Maybe you want a list of all the five star shows you’ve seen! Just go and create a list. Meeting up with a friend and want to suggest things you could see? Make a list for them! It’s easy! And I thought it would be relatively easy to add to the site.
And I was wrong. But I did it anyway.
Filter search
Got a big old table of events and want to get to one in particular, quickly?
I was finding that process a bit annoying, so now there's a search icon at the top of the table. Click on that and you can quickly search through just any events you've already filtered (whether that's the list of events you're interested in, or events anyone has saved, or whatever it might be).
It will also search venues, so if you want to quickly see just e.g. Summerhall events, type that in and you’re done.
The search (both the general search and this filter search) is still not great – you have to be very exact with it. I have plans to improve it at some point.
Individual event pages and an everyone activity feed
Two great updates – really thrilling, the sort of thing where you might go “Wow, that's great!” or maybe “Huh, I’m a little surprised that was missing before”.
Each event now has its own individual page, where you can see its details as well as everyone who's bookmarked it: people you follow and people you don’t (but not private accounts of people you don’t).
And there’s an activity page option to just see everything anyone is up to (with the same private account caveat).
Enjoy.
Book Fringe!
I’ve added the Book Fringe! The free, bookshop-run, alternative literary festival, run by Edinburgh treasures Lighthouse Bookshop, Argonaut Books and Typewronger.
Whereas all the data for the other festivals comes from the (much appreciated) Edinburgh Festivals Listings API, I had to put Book Fringe events in manually, so – as with any process in which I involve myself – there’s an increased likelihood of error.
See any mistakes? festies@outwith.work.
Logo and a festival view
Hey, there's a little logo in the corner instead of just the word 'Festies' in a stern but elegant sans serif. Thanks for the help, Tom Humberstone aka @tomhumberstone!
There's also a page where you can view all of a specific festival's events (and filter from there) like the Fringe, the Book Festival, and – you get the idea. Just click on a festival’s name in a listing. Or I made a page with a list of festivals, in case that’s useful.