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swirl.events Documentation

Finding events

The home page

The landing page opens with a rotating hero of popular upcoming events, then a stack of horizontal rails grouped by when (“Today / Tonight”, “This weekend”, “Coming up this week”, “Later”), then a rail per popular category. Tiles are 4:3 with a date chip, the title, venue and city, and a tag or two.

Swipe on touch, scroll horizontally on a trackpad, hover for chevrons with a mouse.

The location pill

Top-left, next to the search. Tap it for:

  • Use my current location — asks the browser for permission, then snaps to your area. Reverse-geocoded to a human-readable city.
  • Everywhere — drops the location filter entirely. You see what we’ve got, from wherever.
  • Type a place — autocomplete combines cities Swirl already covers (these surface first, fast) with worldwide cities from Mapbox (debounced ~220ms after you stop typing).
  • Recent locations — your last few picks. Each row has a small × if you want to forget it.
  • Radius — 5, 10, 25, 50, 100. Toggle between mi and km with the unit pill.

Your pick sticks across sessions, in your browser only. Changing it reshuffles every tile and rail in place — no page reload.

Location-aware URLs

Pick a place from the popover and the URL becomes something like:

swirl.events/near/us/california/oakland/25mi/

It’s shareable — anyone opening it sees Oakland events within 25 miles, regardless of where they are. The /near/... prefix sticks as you browse to /browse, categories, and search, and falls away on individual event pages (those are canonical from anywhere).

Filtering on /browse

Hit Browse or any category in the top nav for the grid view. Two chip rows sit above the events:

When:

  • All upcoming (default)
  • Today
  • Tonight — only shows after 5pm; before that, “Today” covers it
  • This weekend — anchored on the most recent Friday, so a Saturday morning event reads as “This weekend”, not “Next weekend”
  • This week
  • Recent past — events that wrapped in the last 14 days

Category: the eight most popular tags appear inline; the rest live in a searchable “More” popover. Whatever’s active stays pinned to the visible row even if it’d otherwise overflow.

Chips are mutually exclusive within each row.

Top-right in the header. Type and hit Enter — you land on /browse?q=... with results matched against title, tags, venue, host, city, and description.

Your last several searches show up in a dropdown when the input is empty and focused. Each has a × if you want to wipe it.

Recurring series

A weekly thing shows up as one tile, with “+11 more upcoming” if there are eleven more dates. Tap to see the series page — cadence (“Weekly · Tuesdays at 4:00 PM”), full occurrence list, the works. Recent-past events skip the collapse so each one shows individually.

”Interested”

Every tile has a small bookmark icon in the corner. Tap to add the event to your Interested list at swirl.events/watching. No sign-in, no server — it lives in your browser. See RSVP & Interested for the longer story.

What “near you” means

By default we use a city-level approximation from a one-time IP lookup on your first visit. Want tighter? Tap Use my current location. Want to skip device location entirely? Just type your city in the popover — the result’s identical.