About chi·feed
chi·feed is one feed of what's going on in Chicago — concerts, festivals, gallery openings, comedy, ballgames, park events, and the free community stuff that never makes a ticket site — built and run by one person who got tired of checking six websites to plan a Friday.
Who runs it
I'm James, a software developer in Chicago. chi·feed is an independent side project: no company behind it, no venue or promoter pays to be listed, and no listing is ranked for money. I write the code, curate the sources, review the flags people send in, and write the weekly roundup. If something on the site is wrong, it's my fault and I'd like to hear about it — see Contact.
What it actually does
Every three hours the site pulls upcoming events from the city's main listing feeds — Ticketmaster, Do312, Choose Chicago, Eventbrite, the City's DCASE cultural calendar, and the Chicago Park District's permit ledger — and merges them into one calendar. The pull is the easy part. The work that makes the feed usable is what happens next:
- De-duplication across sources. The same show usually shows up on two or three of those feeds with slightly different titles and times. chi·feed matches them (title similarity, start within ninety minutes, same venue) and keeps one listing with every ticket link attached, so you see the show once and can pick where to buy.
- Neighborhoods, not just addresses. Each venue is geocoded and placed in one of Chicago's 77 official community areas, so "what's on in Logan Square this weekend" is a real filter rather than a text search.
- Ledger clean-up. Ticket sites list a museum's timed-entry slots as hundreds of separate "events"; the Park District lists a four-day festival as hundreds of permit rows. Those are collapsed into one listing each.
- A consistent set of categories, prices, and a free flag across sources that each describe events differently.
- Corrections that stick. When a reader flags a wrong time or venue and I fix it, the fixed field is locked so the next automated refresh can't overwrite it.
The full list of sources, what each one contributes, and what chi·feed adds on top is on How we source events.
What it isn't
chi·feed doesn't sell tickets, and the event descriptions on individual listings come from the original listing — we link straight to the source for tickets and details rather than rewriting them. That's deliberate: the value here is the merged, filtered, mapped view of the city, plus the original writing in the weekly editorial roundup, not a second copy of somebody else's blurb. For the same reason, individual listing pages are marked for search engines as not-to-index unless they carry something original.
Accounts and privacy
You can use everything without signing in. An account (Google sign-in) only adds synced saves, follows, and notifications, and the site stores as little as it can about you — no name, no photo, and your email only in encrypted form. The details are in the privacy policy, written to match what the software actually does.
Open to machines too
The same feed is available as a read-only MCP server at
https://chi-feed.com/mcp — add it as a custom connector in an AI assistant
and it can answer "what's free in Pilsen on Saturday" from the same data.