Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

16 items tagged “lanyrd”

2013

Is Lanyrd any good?

For some verticals, we’re excellent: we have by far the most comprehensive listing of tech/programming/startup-related conferences anywhere online, curated by our growing community of event enthusiasts. If you’re interested in events in those niches it’s absolutely worth signing up, trying out our recommendations and subscribing to our email updates.

[... 180 words]

What are good and easy practices for frequent web deployments?

At Lanyrd we use a combination of Fabric to drive our deploy scripts, git to get the code on to the servers, puppet for configuration management and Jenkins to run continuous integration tests and provide a “deploy the site” button.

[... 262 words]

2012

What is the technology stack behind Lanyrd?

Lanyrd is principally a Django application—we use Django and Python for almost every aspect of the web application itself, as well as the backend for our iPhone application.

[... 195 words]

2011

How do events get listed on Lanyrd?

We’re not automated—all of our events are added by our community. If we’re not listing your event yet, you can sign in with twitter and add it yourself (try http://lanyrd.com/conferences/add )

[... 47 words]

If Lanyrd allows anyone to edit conference information, how do you assure users that the information is correct?

The same way that wikipedia does—by relying on users to fix problems as they spot them. So far this has worked extremely well. We also prominently link to the official conference website so people can check the information themselves if they need to.

[... 69 words]

Where can I get a calendar of upcoming tech conferences in South Africa?

Try our list here: http://lanyrd.com/places/south-a...

[... 25 words]

Are all Lanyrd conferences uploaded by users?

Yes—all of Lanyrd’s events are added by a regular user of the site.

[... 28 words]

How do you pronounce Lanyrd?

We pronounce it “Lan-yurd” or “Lan-yud”.

[... 17 words]

Which database engine does Lanyrd use?

We’re on MySQL (InnoDB), using Amazon’s RDS. We have enough to worry about without tuning and configuring our own database server.

[... 33 words]

Is Lanyrd meant to be tech-industry specific, or is that just a byproduct of the early adopter demographic?

We want to cover all sorts of conferences (and user groups, and meetups, and conventions... any event where people get together to share their knowledge). We have a good start on technology because that’s where our early adopters are, but we’re starting to pick up in a few other categories as well. Here are some of my favourite examples:

[... 94 words]

Get Lanyrd conference recommendations by email. This is the first time I’ve built a custom email subscription feature, and it’s been a very interesting ride. We’re trying to find the right balance between keeping people informed in a timely fashion with useful information while not overloading their inbox with too many messages. You can opt for daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly emails and we’ll try to ensure you only hear about events you haven’t seen before. # 28th January 2011, 11:28 am

Display your events on your own website with Lanyrd Badges. We’ve launched badges for Lanyrd—JavaScript that lets you embed a top bar or a content “splat” showing events you plan to attend, talks you’ve given in the past and other various combinations. I’m quite pleased with the implementation—the badges are configured using classes on a link to your Lanyrd profile, and the badges themselves are served through a combination of Amazon CloudFront for the initial script and a Varnish cache for the badge data itself to keep things nice and snappy. # 13th January 2011, 8:38 pm

2010

Find conferences to speak at with Lanyrd. We just launched calls for participation on Lanyrd. You can list calls for any conference, browse them by topic, and subscribe to an Atom feed of calls for your area of interest. # 24th November 2010, 2:38 am

How does Lanyrd compare to Plancast?

Plancast is a general purpose event site. They handle concerts, birthday parties, gigs, conferences and so on. They allow you to sign in with Twitter or Facebook, and make use of your social graph from both.

[... 429 words]

Welcome to Lanyrd | The Lanyrd Blog. We’ve started a blog for Lanyrd, our social conference directory project. We’re off to a great start: “Lanyrd is now listing 1,508 conferences and 5,167 individual speaker profiles. 5,637 people have signed in to the site and made 13,293 edits to our data.” # 11th September 2010, 9:32 pm

Lanyrd—the social conference directory. Nat and my new project, launched today and doing pretty well despite some early server hiccups. Sign in with Twitter to see conferences that your friends are speaking at, attending or tracking, then add your own events. We’re particularly keen on helping people build up a detailed profile of their previous talks, so adding older conferences is encouraged. # 31st August 2010, 7:41 pm