I'm currently working on moving everything over from the old website. Originally hosted with Squarespace, I'm moving over to Bandzoogle. During this time you may see some pages change, sections shuffle, and a bit of general disorganization. That's expected, and I'm hoping to have everything moved quickly! In fact, the last thing I'm going to move is the actual domain (the web-address “jakebartolin.com”) so you may not even notice any changes. As of writing, this website is located at jakebartolin.bandzoogle.com, but eventually it will replace the old one.

Reasons for the Move

The #1 reason I have a website in the first place is to publicly share my show schedule. Since 2021, I've played 100+ shows a year and I have no plans on stopping anytime soon. This usually means I'm spending most of my website editing time putting together calendar and maintaining. That being said, the event system in Squarespace was never something I was happy with. The controls for creating a new event were poorly chosen and are uncomfortable to use, the ability to manage events is clunky and slow to respond, and even if that wasn't the case, there's no way to import my calendar data (.ics file) into Squarespace to bypass it if I wanted to. The whole system is painful to work with.

I did try a work around by simply listing all my shows as plain text, and this kind or worked for awhile. Eventually though, I got tired of manually moving text boxes and labels around. Plus, the text editor in Squarespace will continually fail to function properly with multi-tiered bullet points (The fix for this was to save your progress and reload the webpage.

Introducing Bandzoogle

While the feature set of Bandzoogle is certainly more limited, their target demographic is much narrower in scope. Many of the features are dumbed down and aren't quite as powerful as Squarespace (can't natively host videos for example), but for much of what I need, that's OK. 

Most importantly, I find the events system to be a total joy to use. You can save and re-use location information when creating events. This is perfect for a bar musician like me who has many shows at the same venues, but not always as a regular schedule. And speaking of regular schedule, you can tell the Bandzoogle system to repeat events if they happen regularly (ex: every Tuesday 6-9 for example). I can confidently say that entering my remaining shows for 2024 took less then 20% of the time it would with Squarespace.

Of course, they've got some additional stuff like mailing lists and whatnot that I may use in the future, but for now I need to get the replacement complete.

What to Look For

In the next week or so, I'll be ensuring all the content from the old website is migrated over. I'll also be giving each of the main pages a good look over to ensure the content flows nicely while viewing it. Eventually I'll kick some links out to some friends to have them give the website a look-through, before finally changing the domain from jakebartolin.bandzoogle.com to my own (much nicer looking) jakebartolin.com. I'm hoping this streamlines the process for me to make updates and share some of the cool things that I've been working on (and hopefully some upcoming projects).