Corning Events

A background service that aggregates public leisure events in and around Corning, New York and publishes them as subscribable iCal feeds.

Events are collected daily from regional calendars, venue sites and ticketing APIs, deduplicated across sources, filtered by distance from Corning, and written out as static .ics files served over HTTPS by GitHub Pages. Anyone with the feed URL can subscribe once in Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or any other client and see the events alongside their own.

Status

Live and running. A GitHub Actions workflow rebuilds the feeds every morning and publishes them to GitHub Pages. Each run collects around 540 events from five sources and publishes around 520 after deduplication, roughly 310 of them inside the 25 mile default feed. Exact counts drift daily as events pass and new ones are listed; the subscribe page shows the current numbers.

Three sources in the registry are disabled because they cannot be read by a client that identifies itself honestly. See Coverage gaps below.

Feeds

Open the subscribe page and tap a Subscribe link. That is the easiest route on a phone, and the only place the one-tap links work.

Feed	Contents	Direct link
corning-core.ics	Core and Near rings, up to 25 miles, all categories. The default.	corning-core.ics
flx-all.ics	Everything within 50 miles, including Ithaca and the Finger Lakes.	flx-all.ics

One-tap subscription on iOS and macOS needs the webcal scheme. GitHub strips webcal:// links out of README files, so they cannot be clickable here; copy one of these instead, or use the subscribe page above where they do work.

webcal://davekt.github.io/corning_events/corning-core.ics
webcal://davekt.github.io/corning_events/flx-all.ics

In Google Calendar, use Other calendars, From URL and paste the https link. Google refreshes external subscriptions on its own schedule, often many hours behind, and offers no way to force it.

Geographic scope

Anchored at 42.1481, -77.0569. Events are classified into rings by city tag, coordinates, or source, and anything beyond fifty miles is dropped.

Ring	Radius	Examples
Core	0 to 10 miles	Corning, Painted Post, Erwin, Big Flats, Horseheads
Near	10 to 25 miles	Elmira, Bath, Watkins Glen, Addison
Regional	25 to 50 miles	Hammondsport, Ithaca, Penn Yan, Owego, Geneva

Documentation

Path	Contents
plans/archive/	The build plan, now complete. Records every decision and every place the source spec turned out to be wrong
plans/spec/	Reference material the plans are written against
plans/spec/corning-events-source-spec.md	Source registry: every data source, its format, quirks and known breakage

docs/ is not documentation. It is the GitHub Pages web root, holds only generated .ics output and its index page, and must never be hand-edited. The name is fixed because branch-based GitHub Pages will serve only from the repository root or from /docs.

Running locally

Requires Python 3.11 or newer. There is no install step: the package sits at the repository root, so run everything from there.

python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
python -m corning_events.main --dry-run

Useful flags: --sources flxcalendar,ssclibrary limits the run to named sources and runs them even while disabled in config, which is how a parser under development gets exercised. --dry-run skips writing feeds and state, and --db PATH points at an alternative state database.

Tests run offline against saved fixtures:

pytest

TICKETMASTER_API_KEY enables the Ticketmaster source. Without it that one source skips with a warning and everything else runs normally.

Coverage gaps

Three sources are registered but disabled, and one is unverified. Each module documents its own situation.

Source	Problem	Route back
Corning Museum of Glass	Every cmog.org domain answers a non-browser request with a Cloudflare bot challenge. The largest single gap: the museum has the highest event volume in the city and nothing else carries it	Ask the museum for an allowlist entry or a feed URL
Southeast Steuben County Library	Same bot challenge. Partly covered by FLXcalendar and the Chamber	Ask the library, who publish the feed for public subscription
Corning's Gaffer District	Events render client-side with no reachable data endpoint. Its static festival pages give dates as prose with no year, and guessing would put wrong dates in a calendar. Nothing else covers GlassFest and the other downtown festivals	Read the endpoint out of a browser session
Ticketmaster	Implemented but never run against a live response, since no API key was available	Add TICKETMASTER_API_KEY as a repository secret

The parsers for the first two are written and tested, so each needs only a config change if access is arranged.

How it works

The daily GitHub Actions run fetches every enabled source, upserts the results into a SQLite database committed alongside the code, clusters duplicate records across sources, resolves conflicting field values by source trust order, detects cancellations, and emits the feeds. State persists in the repository because stable UIDs, SEQUENCE increments and cancellation detection all require knowing what the previous run published.

Two properties matter most and are covered by tests. Published UIDs are minted once per event cluster and never regenerated, because a changing UID makes subscribers accumulate duplicates. And cancellation only ever fires for a source whose fetch actually succeeded and returned events, because otherwise one failed request would wipe a subscriber's calendar.

Adding a source

Write a module in corning_events/sources/ exposing a fetch function that returns a list of Event, following the contract documented in sources/base.py. Register it in the FETCHERS map in sources/__init__.py, add a matching SourceConfig to config.SOURCES with a default ring and trust band, and save one raw capture into tests/fixtures/ with a parser test against it. Nothing else in the pipeline needs to change.

Attribution and etiquette

Feeds redistribute listings published by other organizations, so every event carries its originating source name and a link back in the description, and the URL property points at the organizer's own page wherever one is known. Requests identify themselves with a descriptive User-Agent and run at most once per day per source.

Feed URLs are public. An unlisted URL is obscurity rather than access control, so nothing private appears in any event field.