Years ago, I started a Tumblr site documenting every concert I’ve been to, dating back to 1991. Apparently I stopped updating it in 2017, but I always had the idea of going back to it and filling it in.
Flash forward to 2025, and I am now a WordPress geek always looking for an excuse to build something. I owned the URL of my name but did nothing with it. Turns out that the hosting service (Hostinger, free plug) I use for my podcasting site allows me to run multiple WordPress sites at no extra cost – so I moved my domain over with the idea of using that as a place to practice coding and play around with WordPress developing.
This was my excuse to rebuild “My Concert” blog. It look me a while to put everything together, because I was working on two major components at the same time. The first one actually posting each concert.
I used my Tumblr site as a starting-point, but upon further review I discovered there were a handful of shows that I completely missed. For those I had to go by memory, by emailing my brother, and by digging into old setlists, tours, and even old newspaper articles.
I’m still not 100% sure that I am 100% accurate. I had a Van Halen concert listed incorrectly going all the way back to my Tumblr site. There were a couple shows in there that I went with my wife to that I am 97% sure are right. I know we went to the concert – and I know it was at this venue, so it had to be this Friday show (or was it the Saturday show?). Either way, those concerts are at least represented – at still probably correct.
Once smart phones and cameras became more prevalent – especially with Google photos – it was easier to find exact dates for shows. Yeah I take photos at concerts. I try to not take video anymore because I never watch them – but I love at least documenting that “I was here” – and it really helped out for this project.
Once every concert was documented, the next step was how to organize that content in a way that made sense and took advantage of WordPress.
On my old Tumblr site, I posted it by band – which means if I went to see an concert that had and opener and a headliner, that would be two separate posts.
This time around, I wanted to do things more dynamically. I want to have three different sections with different custom post types (WordPress nerds get that) and I wanted them all to connect to each other.
The main post type for this section is “Concerts” – those are the shows, the events that is the main focus on the blog. Within each concert, I can select from a list of musicians for a headliner and for any opening acts. I can also select a venue from a list of places that I’ve seen concerts.
For each musician I can also post in the setlist.fm setlist and I created some find/replace rules in the functions file that take that URL and turn it into an embedded playlist image (which seems to be the setlist.fm norm)
Looking back, I wonder if I could have made musicians/venues a custom taxonomy instead of custom post list, but I love using the “relationship” field to tag posts together.
Oh, I didn’t mention – my love of WordPress skyrocketed when I first discovered the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. It’s been my best friend at both work and for any personal websites I create. I bought a lifetime license years ago – before it became a subscription-based service – and have been using it ever since.
I love how I can use it to allow my posts to connect. When I post about a concert, I select musicians and a venue. Each musician has a page that shows a list of concerts I’ve seen them at, broken out into two tables – one for headliners and one for opening acts. It also lists the venue of each concert.
Each venue page shows a list of concerts I’ve seen – along with the date and the name of the venue at the time (which is an option within each concert post – because these venues change names more often then some disgraced rappers).
I also connected to the Google Maps API so that each venue I can find the location and the API posts both the street address (as plain text) and an embedded map. That one was fun figuring out.
Eventually, I’d like to post something about each musician on their page – that one will take a while. I’ve done it for a couple bands so far, hope to eventually do them all. There are currently 109.
109 musicians spanning 88 concerts over 34 years.
34 years and counting…