I've setup an RSS feed for local concerts powered by SeatGeek. We (at SeatGeek) don't have one built-in but we do have an API. The page isn't pretty but I find it useful for finding any events I may want to go to. With tagging in NewsBlur I can filter events more easily.
I built this with Erlang as a way to test out the language. There isn't really a direct need for high concurrency but it was a good chance to give it a try. I've learned that I really like Erlang, it's rather terse and has constructs built into OTP that make writing software a joy. At some point I need to tackle using releases, but I'm not there yet.
When I spend more time on the RSS feed I'll eventually include affiliate links. It takes a lot of traffic to make money with affiliates especially at most concert prices. But maybe it will be an incentive for me to turn this into something even more useful.
As I am starting out with Erlang I've just added dependencies to the end of
my Rebar config and everything just kind of worked. I added each dependency
one-by-one and didn't have a problem until I cleaned out the deps folder
and tried to recompile. Then I ran into this error:
src/ranch_protocol.erl:none: undefined parse transform 'lager_transform'
I knew that it was working before and that the parse transform wasn't an issue. Turns out the dependency ordering matters! Shouldn't be too big a surprise but Rebar uses the list of dependencies as the ordering for compilation, not any kind of introspection. I just had to put the Lager dependency above Ranch and everything worked out.