When I was converting everything over from the old drunks.ca site, I tagged each event with relevant information. Usually it’s just the bar name, but any of the annual events also got their own tag.

I just added a tag cloud page. Now theoretically this will change over time but, let’s be honest, there’s not going to be a lot of churn in the coming years. There are some interesting trends there:

• Fuck, we go to the Duke of York a lot.
• Also the Bedford Academy and C’est What, although those have fallen out of favour recently.
• The pub crawl, Kris Kringle and GNWTL events are all relatively prominent.
• I count seven bars that have since closed; there may be more.

I started a new microblog dedicated to stupid photos of the 2011 federal election campaign: stupidelectionphotos.tumblr.com.

It was really just a couple of hours work – Tumblr is pretty easy to set up. The hardest part was figuring out how to use the Facebook “like” operation properly.

Let me know if I’ve missed any pictures!

While I was converting the site over to the new format, I noticed a few things:

• We can’t agree on how to spell some bar names. Pauper’s/Paupers and Ein-Stein/Einstein’s are just two of them.
• Similarly, we couldn’t agree how to link to these bars. Back in 2001, a lot of these places didn’t have dedicated websites and we linked to sites like toronto.com, which appears to have done at least one reorganization that broke old URLs.
• I really can’t talk, because I decided not to preserve the old URL structure.
• At some point, we started linking to Ben’s wiki as a central place to gather information for different bars and pub crawl rules and that sort of thing. Great idea, but that wiki is long gone. If I get energetic enough, I’ll add pages locally for different bars and event types.
• We’ve had over a hundred events! That’s more than I would have guessed, especially considering that we’re basically down to three a year now.

You may have noticed a few changes around here. I figured it was time for a facelift. The old drunks.ca was a bit of a pain to maintain and was generally ugly. I’ve been meaning to replace it with a database-driven backend but frankly never had the energy for it.

When I picked up the project again, I thought I’d try and use WordPress to manage the site. It’s blogging software, but has a fairly robust model that can be twisted into a non-blogging site. It’s all backed by a database. Each event is actually a blog entry, but I manage them separately and display them in a different format than real blog entries.

Technical details: the event entries are in their own category that is only picked up by the relevant pages. The WordPress install is using a modified Twenty Ten theme, which is why it might look familiar (it’s the default theme but I like it better than anything else I could find). I’ve turned off all commenting (I hope!). I’m not proud of some of the code that’s backing the site up – I’ve got the same post template defined in at least three different places – but I think it holds together okay.

I’ve used tags to identify different events (Kris Kringle, Getting Nailed) and the bars that we attend. I’ll be doing an analysis of these tags in the future – there’s some interesting trends that can be seen in the tag chart.

If you find anything out of place or missing, please let me know.