This is a script to poll Akimbo (a site used by Canadian artists) to display a list of calls for submissions, together with their indicated deadlines. The calls are sorted by deadline, so the most urgent calls are listed first.
This script was written mainly because it’s very difficult to figure out what the deadlines are using Akimbo’s interface (which is pretty much just an unmodded WordPress theme). It is also impossible to filter out listings that are past their deadlines using their UI.
If you’ve ever looked at Akimbo’s RSS feed (when it still existed) or given some thought to what fields are on their posting pages, you know there’s no deadline field.
However, they do try to mark up deadlines with a CSS class text-deadline (usually with <span class="text-deadline">).
So we can examine the page and look for these marked-up text snippets.
There are only two problems:
First, the dates are all in English or French. You have to parse the English (or French) to figure out the actual date and time, so sometimes you’re not sure, and most of the time you don’t know the time zone.
Second, sometimes some deadlines are not marked with the text-deadline class.
Maybe someone forgot to use house style,
but there’s nothing we can do.
Akimbo has an option to list only art calls. In theory we can poll this list and we’ll get all art calls and all of what we get will be art calls. In reality some calls are listed under, say, learning experiences (which is often the case for residencies) or generic events (for example, some government CFP’s for high-budget public art projects). So the script just polls the main page, which contains all types of events.
To reduce the amount of noise,
the script assumes
all listings without a deadline
to be non-calls.
These are removed from the display unless you specify the -A (or --almost-all) option..
Obviously, even with the filtering there will be some non-calls in the list. Most of these will be things like job postings or educational opportunities that aren’t residencies.
The script is designed to be very gentle on the Akimbo server. It should load the server even less than an ordinary graphical web browser since only the text is loaded, not any graphics, style sheets or scripts.
Only one page of the listing is loaded (it will not click Next) and the listing is loaded only every hour. (It caches the listings page and will not load a new copy until an hour has passed.)
Details of the calls (including deadlines) require loading individual posts (just like we have to control-click each post to open individual posts on a graphical web browser), but these loads are always accompanied by a delay to further reduce server load. Posts are cached so every post will only be loaded once unless their URL’s change.
Time zone “support” is entirely wrong. In particular, not all zones are recognized, the user is assumed to be in the Eastern time zone, and the script doesn’t know how to deal with the Atlantic time zone.
Paths of the script’s dependencies like file(1) or wget(1) are all hard-coded.
The --dry-run option doesn’t prevent all actions.
- file(1)
- wget(1)
- zcat(1) (from gzip)