About The Casco Current

The Casco Current is a free community resource to help people find interesting happenings around Greater Portland. And in case you are lost, we're talking about Portland, Maine.

My inspiration came from the now-defunct PortlandCheatSheet.com. The person who ran it poured their heart into it, but couldn't keep up with the effort. The Text Version of The Casco Current is a nod to that inspiration.

If you find this site useful, please consider donating to Maine Needs or the ECC.

Now get out there and find something fun to do! -Jesse

For venue and site owners

If you are a venue owner, event organizer or run a local website and want to see your events here, please use the Submit Event page or reach out using the Contact form. I'm happy to add coverage of sites that don't require manual parsing (e.g., calendar format but not blog format). For verifiable venues, I also provide free access to add your own events. I don't expect to get 100% coverage of all the awesome stuff we have going on, but I'd love to get close.

Most of the events here are collected automatically. A script called CascoCurrentBot reads venue calendar pages once a night and copies the event details into our listings. If you run a venue site and see it in your logs, it identifies itself as: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; CascoCurrentBot/1.0; +https://cascocurrent.com/about)

It is deliberately small and boring. For any one venue it fetches a handful of calendar pages: usually between one and a dozen requests, once per night, one at a time. It does not crawl your whole site, it does not follow links into your store or checkout, it does not submit forms, and it does not collect anything that isn't already on your public calendar. If your server asks us to slow down, we wait and try again later.

Every event we list links straight back to your own page, so this sends visitors to you rather than away from you.

If you would rather we didn't list your events, or you want us to fetch less often, just say so through the Contact page and we'll do it. If our requests are being blocked by a firewall or bot filter and you'd like to let us through, get in touch and we'll send whatever details your host needs.