How it's built
Colophon
What powers WNC What, where the events come from, and why some choices look the way they do.
The short version
WNCWhat is a static site — plain HTML, CSS and a little JavaScript, no framework, no accounts, no paywall. Python scrapers check public local sources for Western North Carolina every day, and a merge step dedupes, validates and expires what they find before a generator rewrites every page you see.
The data
One scraper module per source. Each tries the gentlest strategy that works — a public API or feed first, structured markup next, plain HTML only as a last resort — and respects each source's robots rules. A small curated layer of local fixtures keeps the calendar honest even when a source goes quiet, and every listing links out to the original source for tickets and detail.
The pages
Every upcoming event gets its own page with Schema.org Event markup, and the sitemap regenerates on every run — that's how search engines keep up. Nothing is rendered on a server; what you load is a file written the last time the pipeline ran.
The hosting
The whole site is served from Firebase Hosting. There's no database and no backend to fall over on a busy weekend.
Spotted something wrong — or building something similar and want to compare notes? Reach us at hey@wncwhat.com.