Zen retreats sound fun, right? But how do you get involved? When is a retreat happening nearby? Is the retreat beginner friendly?
All of these questions (and more!) is what zenfo.info aims to answer. Unless you're actively involved in a community, it may be difficult to learn of new events going on near your area. Even if you are involved in a community, the events you hear of in person are usually just related to that specific group.
What if you're traveling, and wish to attend a short retreat? Many Zen centers have websites, and some list events on a calendar page. However, some groups only notify of events in person or mailing list. Zen groups are typically low budget, and usually not too tech savvy. This is where zenfo.info comes in - simply visit the site to see a compiled list of events going on around the world.
There are three main pieces:
- Crawlers
The crawlers gather event information from a list of specific websites. Any information found is stored into Postgres.
- HTTP API
A web server provides API endpoints to retreive event information.
- UI
React frontend calls API to provide something useable on the browser.
So far there are two sources:
- San Francisco Zen Center (sfzc.org)
- Angel City Zen Center (aczc.org)
Sources are scraped by using the Worker interface. All workers share a common HTTP client which provides a custom user agent. And in the future there will need to be rate limiting per site.
- Add at least two more sources for crawling. Ideally one from East Bay, and one South Bay.
- Add basic frontend UI, ideally something in JS.
- Add some sort of detection on when a crawler is completely busted and needs updating.
- Add Dockerfile for easy deploy.
make docker
make setup
make build
make db
make http-dev
I do this outside of Docker.
npm install
npm run start
Currently this project is licensed under AGPL v3.0. See LICENSE for details.
I'm usually not a fan of anything GPL, but with this project it feels right. License may change in the future to something more permissive.