Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document • Hacker News Board

Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document

#91

Post by senthil_rajasek » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 9:25 AM UTC

al_borland wrote: post #85

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahhh that totally makes sense. Thanks for researching and sharing. Portugal The Man is "made" but my concern was that the new bands that are still struggling to make it should not take inspiration from this and create a google sheets website. That would be terrible for their career.

I would hope that a website wouldn’t make or break an artist. It’s about the music after all. Outside of looking at this post, I don’t think I could tell you what a single musician’s webpage looks like. It’s not something I ever look at. For concerts, I tend to look for who is coming to venues near me, rather than looking at 200 band websites and hoping they are both on tour and near me. Do most people go to the band…

If you already know a band's music or an artist work it may not matter as much.

But for artists who are not well known, a website can help make a great first impression.

I found this Apple Music for artists page a good intro on why promo/marketing materials are important.

https://artists.apple.com/support/1121-why-an-electronic-pre...

Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document

#92

Post by lovasoa » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 9:26 AM UTC

alin23 wrote: post #64

I also have an iOS published app that has a Google Sheets “backend”: https://subsol.one It’s an app for finding parties and festivals in Romania, and the sheets choice makes it super easy for my brother and his friends to add parties to the app. I thought about adding a “real” database and tried some apps/frontends for them, but nothing made it easy enough to update and insert rows for non technical people. I figured…

For your next app backend, you should try SQLPage [1][2]

It makes creating a small web form to feed your database as easy as

    SELECT 'form' AS component;
    SELECT name, label, type FROM form_fields;

    INSERT INTO parties(name, date) VALUES(:name, :date);

And creating an api on top of that db as simple as:

    SELECT 'json' AS component, 
      (SELECT JSON_GROUP_ARRAY(JSON_OBJECT('name', name, 'date', date)) FROM parties) AS contents;

[1] https://sql.ophir.dev/ [2] https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLPage

Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document

#93

Post by raybb » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 9:37 AM UTC

lovasoa wrote: post #92

alin23 wrote: post #64

I also have an iOS published app that has a Google Sheets “backend”: https://subsol.one It’s an app for finding parties and festivals in Romania, and the sheets choice makes it super easy for my brother and his friends to add parties to the app. I thought about adding a “real” database and tried some apps/frontends for them, but nothing made it easy enough to update and insert rows for non technical people. I figured…

For your next app backend, you should try SQLPage [1][2] It makes creating a small web form to feed your database as easy as SELECT 'form' AS component; SELECT name, label, type FROM form_fields; INSERT INTO parties(name, date) VALUES(:name, :date); And creating an api on top of that db as simple as: SELECT 'json' AS component, (SELECT JSON_GROUP_ARRAY(JSON_OBJECT('name', name, 'date', date)) FROM parties) AS content…

I like the idea of this a lot, but does it provide any way to edit the data?

Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document

#94

Post by vk6flab » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 9:38 AM UTC

I'm surprised that Google Sheets hasn't been throttled on that url yet.

At one point I provided live tracking data to a popular event site using Google Sheets and advised their web team to create a local cache of the data and refresh it every 10 minutes. Instead they ignored that advice and included the document itself into the home-page. The document was hugged to death within about 30 minutes of going live on a four day event and it took days for Google to increase their throttle, at which point it didn't matter any more, since the event was over.

I realise that Google has infrastructure to handle this load, but an international event, with a (then) Google Apps account, was unable to make enough noise at Google to fix things in a timely manner.

Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document

#95

Post by alin23 » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 9:47 AM UTC

lovasoa wrote: post #92

alin23 wrote: post #64

I also have an iOS published app that has a Google Sheets “backend”: https://subsol.one It’s an app for finding parties and festivals in Romania, and the sheets choice makes it super easy for my brother and his friends to add parties to the app. I thought about adding a “real” database and tried some apps/frontends for them, but nothing made it easy enough to update and insert rows for non technical people. I figured…

For your next app backend, you should try SQLPage [1][2] It makes creating a small web form to feed your database as easy as SELECT 'form' AS component; SELECT name, label, type FROM form_fields; INSERT INTO parties(name, date) VALUES(:name, :date); And creating an api on top of that db as simple as: SELECT 'json' AS component, (SELECT JSON_GROUP_ARRAY(JSON_OBJECT('name', name, 'date', date)) FROM parties) AS content…

Thanks for building this, and for the sample code :)

Although what sheets excels at is batch editing and collaboration, which is really hard to get in an SQL frontend. My brother usually runs a Raycast workflow I wrote for him to extract a small number of party data as TSV which gets copied in clipboard. Then in sheets he can just paste that to get full rows and columns populated.

After that he and his friends start proof reading and cross referencing social media data for each row, and Sheets makes this super easy as they can see each row highlighted with each user’s color so they don’t step on each other’s toes.

Your solution is still very good for other use cases and I think I already have one in mind. My father always wanted to maintain a list of up-to-date prices for the vegetables that sell in my hometown’s large wholesale market.

Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document

#96

Post by thfuran » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 10:00 AM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #89

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #9

I love this band. But this is actually a terrible idea. Artist websites (IMO) have an actual purpose, keeping your audience updated with tour dates for one. Agents and venues looking for promo pictures. Festival planners looking to get a sense of your style etc., Artist websites have a variety of audiences. My bet would be that they started tracking tour dates on a Google Sheet and decided to share it to a tour manag…

Band websites used to be very much about an art experience and very little about conveying any kinds of facts. Back in the early 2000s homepages of artists like Radiohead were quite avant-garde and you’d be lucky to learn anything really.

That was a time before almost everyone got almost all their information about everything from the internet.

Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document

#97

Post by lovasoa » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 10:10 AM UTC

raybb wrote: post #93

lovasoa wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your next app backend, you should try SQLPage [1][2] It makes creating a small web form to feed your database as easy as SELECT 'form' AS component; SELECT name, label, type FROM form_fields; INSERT INTO parties(name, date) VALUES(:name, :date); And creating an api on top of that db as simple as: SELECT 'json' AS component, (SELECT JSON_GROUP_ARRAY(JSON_OBJECT('name', name, 'date', date)) FROM parties) AS content…

I like the idea of this a lot, but does it provide any way to edit the data?

You write the SQL yourself, so you can do anything you want, including

   UPDATE parties SET name=:name, date=:date WHERE id=:id;

Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document

#98

Post by internet101010 » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 10:15 AM UTC

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #16

smeyer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that this is a funky artistic choice, and that they used to have a "normal" webpage. I checked with the wayback machine, and it looks like my guess is correct. I clicked randomly into an archive a few years old, and here's 2016 website looking a lot more like what you describe http://web.archive.org/web/20160303191156/http://www.portuga... . I guess an audience that you left out in your description is peo…

Ahhh that totally makes sense. Thanks for researching and sharing. Portugal The Man is "made" but my concern was that the new bands that are still struggling to make it should not take inspiration from this and create a google sheets website. That would be terrible for their career.

Maybe I am not thinking through this enough but... why? Social media accounts and artist pages on streaming platforms showing up at the top of Google search is probably more important than their website.

Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document

#99

Post by martinsmit » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 10:38 AM UTC

Similar to Hyukoh's[1], although it is actually multiple documents. P.TM seem to have gone all in, which is neat.

[1]: http://www.hyukoh.com/

Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document

#100

Post by stavros » Sat, Nov 04, 2023, 10:40 AM UTC

lovasoa wrote: post #92

alin23 wrote: post #64

I also have an iOS published app that has a Google Sheets “backend”: https://subsol.one It’s an app for finding parties and festivals in Romania, and the sheets choice makes it super easy for my brother and his friends to add parties to the app. I thought about adding a “real” database and tried some apps/frontends for them, but nothing made it easy enough to update and insert rows for non technical people. I figured…

For your next app backend, you should try SQLPage [1][2] It makes creating a small web form to feed your database as easy as SELECT 'form' AS component; SELECT name, label, type FROM form_fields; INSERT INTO parties(name, date) VALUES(:name, :date); And creating an api on top of that db as simple as: SELECT 'json' AS component, (SELECT JSON_GROUP_ARRAY(JSON_OBJECT('name', name, 'date', date)) FROM parties) AS content…

This looks really good, but I had to pass on it because I couldn't find screenshots or, even better, a demo site. I think that would really help sell this.