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.
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.
Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document
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Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document
#102A fun funky idea. Sad I can’t think of a ton of HN worthy ideas of musical acts making newsworthy tech-empowered quirky choices. The last thing that comes to mind is Radiohead making In Rainbows pay-what-you-want.
What about when U2’s new album appeared on iPods automatically?
Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document
#103I 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…
Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document
#104I 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…
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…
Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document
#105Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document
#106I 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…
Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most ways of putting up a conventional website don't make updates easy, unless you buy into some whole system, or pay someone. If Sheets is familiar and works, why not? Arguably the fact that the website is more likely to be accurate and up to date this way makes it more user friendly.
Sure, but there are a lot of options these days which are much nicer to look at. For example you can easily share Notion documents as websites.
Hacker News isn’t exactly pretty, and I hope it never will be.
Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document
#108I'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 fou…
It is for me. I get a banner saying some features are disabled due to high traffic.
Re: Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document
#109Spreadsheets: the original no-code platform. I like it. Infinitely scalable, easy to update. Most of the time when I go to an artist's site it's to find tour dates or merch. This does both okay.
About that scaling… I’ve seen workflows with data chunked out into multiple excel files because the results exceeded the row limit (4 million?) Going through all that by hand was a pain, and it took hours to go from a flat file format to spreadsheets. Parquet took this down to seconds, and provided a rich data analysis API. Spreadsheets scale for small to medium-ish workflows and are very much a drag for anything rem…