About
Has Things is an index of what is on tonight, city by city. It reads the places that publish listings — venues, box offices, ticketing platforms, listings magazines, library and university calendars — and puts one night on one page, in the order the evening happens.
It covers 85 cities across Canada, the United States and Mexico. Each has its own address, and each page is a single night: what is on, where, when it starts, and who says so.
Where the listings come from
Every listing is read from a source that publishes it openly, and every event says how many sources mention it. One source is one source — the page says unconfirmed rather than pretending otherwise. When two independent sources agree, that is worth more than either alone, and the listing says so.
Nothing is paid for and nothing is promoted. There is no way to buy a position, because there is no position to buy: the order is the clock. If a listing is wrong, tell us and we will fix the parser, not the row.
What it will not do
- Crawl anything that asked not to be crawled. The crawler obeys robots.txt, identifies itself honestly, and backs off when a site says no — see HasThingsBot.
- Guess. An event with no stated time is shown without one rather than given an invented hour. A venue we cannot place is left off the map rather than pinned somewhere plausible.
- Track you. There are no advertising cookies and no third-party analytics on the listing pages. What you filter is in the URL, and nowhere else.
Using the data
Every night is available as JSON, CSV and iCalendar, and there is a small read-only API. It is meant to be used — by a venue putting its own listings on its own site, by a student with a question about what a city does in the evening, by anyone.
You can also be told what is on rather than come and look, and browse any city by venue.
Who makes it
Has Things is built by Liiift Studio. It is a small, deliberately boring piece of public infrastructure: no app to install, no account to make, no newsletter you have to join to see a listing.