Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document

https://www.portugaltheman.com/?frontpage=true

by nateb2022 • 3 years ago

583 179 3 years ago

portugaltheman.com

artemisyna• 3 years ago

If it works it works?

spondylosaurus• 3 years ago

Doesn't work so well on mobile though :(

jdoliner2• 3 years ago

If it doesn't work it doesn't work.

alanbernstein• 3 years ago

Works fine for me, with the caveat that my phone screen is so big that it doesn't actually fit in my hand

omginternets4• 3 years ago

Does it not work, or are you just saying it could be better?

jdoliner2• 3 years ago

I love these guys. I'm not sure what learning this means for my fan ship. They never struck me as a particular no-frills aesthetic type of group. I wonder if they made this themselves or there's some story behind it.

NoToP2• 3 years ago

They're being rebels just for kicks

omginternets4• 3 years ago

How long have you been feeling it?

j3s• 3 years ago

many websites _should_ be this tbh. lmao

dymk2• 3 years ago

A big javascript mess that doesn't work on phones?

hirvi74• 3 years ago

I can't tell if you are talking about most websites or Google Sheets.

numpad0• 3 years ago

There used to be a nice file format for this called HTML...

KomoD• 3 years ago

They should be an embedded google sheet that is impossible to view properly on mobile and that gets locked if too many view it?

tehwebguy• 3 years ago

This is a pretty good idea to be fair.

meeech• 3 years ago

this.

77pt77• 3 years ago

If you live in Japan, maybe.

senthil_rajasek5• 3 years ago

I love this band.

But this is actually a terrible idea.

Artist websites (IMO) have an actual purpose, keeping your audience updated with tour dates for one. Agents and venues looking for promo pictures. Festival planners looking to get a sense of your style etc.,

Artist websites have a variety of audiences.

My bet would be that they started tracking tour dates on a Google Sheet and decided to share it to a tour manager and here we are...

ashutoshbsathe• 3 years ago

Agents and venues can look at Instagram or other socials for promo pictures and styles etc.

senthil_rajasek5• 3 years ago

Hmmmm ideally you want them to look for your best images not some random after show picture from a fan on social media.

Websites make it easy for you to control your promo material ( EPK).

smeyer• 3 years ago

My guess is that this is a funky artistic choice, and that they used to have a "normal" webpage.

I checked with the wayback machine, and it looks like my guess is correct. I clicked randomly into an archive a few years old, and here's 2016 website looking a lot more like what you describe http://web.archive.org/web/20160303191156/http://www.portuga... .

I guess an audience that you left out in your description is people appreciating the experience of looking at the website or the artist themselves wanting to make a statement. I think the band has thoroughly "made it" so to speak, and doesn't have to worry too much about most of what you mentioned. They do list tour dates in their google sheet and also can sell out pretty large venues easily, and I don't think there are any festival planners who don't know who Portugal, the Man who have any chance of nabbing them for their festival.

senthil_rajasek5• 3 years ago

Ahhh that totally makes sense. Thanks for researching and sharing.

Portugal The Man is "made" but my concern was that the new bands that are still struggling to make it should not take inspiration from this and create a google sheets website. That would be terrible for their career.

runeks3• 3 years ago

Maybe they got tired of paying some web dev money every time they needed to update their page. With Google Sheets they can do that themselves.

roywashere• 3 years ago

They are not the only band to do this. My fav small Dutch band Woezels do the same, just for lolz https://woezels.nl/

pests2• 3 years ago

That's even better because it seems to allow anyone to edit.

jareklupinski• 3 years ago

brutalism through free corporate spreadsheets

could you _get_ more indie than that?

IAmGraydon• 3 years ago

indie

You misspelled “pretentious”.

dkjaudyeqooe• 3 years ago

Most ways of putting up a conventional website don't make updates easy, unless you buy into some whole system, or pay someone. If Sheets is familiar and works, why not?

Arguably the fact that the website is more likely to be accurate and up to date this way makes it more user friendly.

lagt_t• 3 years ago

My 75 year old mother who struggles with the remote still can update her church wordpress.

cl3misch• 3 years ago

Sure, but there are a lot of options these days which are much nicer to look at. For example you can easily share Notion documents as websites.

afavour• 3 years ago

Sadly these days social media fulfills that requirement.

senthil_rajasek5• 3 years ago

Not really. Social media is feed based. Finding "on demand" info such as "when are they playing in my town?" is a nightmare even with pinned posts.

CobrastanJorji• 3 years ago

All of your stated purposes are effectively communicated via this spreadsheet.

omginternets4• 3 years ago

I don’t understand. It seems to be doing exactly the job you specified.

tantalor• 3 years ago

tour dates... pictures

All that stuff is here

tracerbulletx• 3 years ago

Nah, this is 100% an artistic choice.

smcleod2• 3 years ago

I think it's awesome, just the kind of fun thing they'd do.

kevinmchugh• 3 years ago

I saw them live last year and they had the stage lights off the whole show, you couldn't see them at all. They closed with their big hit and played the Beavis and Butthead clip making fun of it first. I think they're a little (playfully) antagonistic

asdfman123• 3 years ago

But all that information is on the website

leehuffman2• 3 years ago

But this is actually a terrible idea.

A lot of people say that about a lot of art. 'Terrible ideas' can be very, very dope though. IMO mapping their primary domain to a fuckin' Google Sheet is banger hah.

Artist websites (IMO) have an actual purpose, keeping your audience updated with tour dates for one.

Those are there, though? Also Google returns the 29 tour tracking/ticketing platforms in their trailing results behind the primary domain. I think the fans will be ok...

Agents and venues looking for promo pictures.
Festival planners looking to get a sense of your style etc.

Bruh it's Portugal. The Man. There is one agent (theirs) and venues/festival "planners" (???) aren't "looking" for promo photos – they're delivered by their agent and/or management with restrictions, guidelines, and approval for promotional use only. They can't just pull random media off the internet for promo.

Nobody is trying to determine their "style". That's been clearly defined for a minute (decade+) now. If anything these people are selling PTM, not the other way around.

My bet would be that they started tracking tour dates on a Google Sheet and decided to share it to a tour manager and here we are...

I can guarantee you that's incorrect. You don't think they plot & plan & intelligently deploy their entire, well... everything? For months on months before we see it? Nobody fumbled about, tweaked the layout & styling, and toggled the Share function on the Google Sheet organically haha.

wodenokoto• 3 years ago

Band websites used to be very much about an art experience and very little about conveying any kinds of facts.

Back in the early 2000s homepages of artists like Radiohead were quite avant-garde and you’d be lucky to learn anything really.

thfuran• 3 years ago

That was a time before almost everyone got almost all their information about everything from the internet.

cxr• 3 years ago

homepages of artists like Radiohead were quite avant-garde and you’d be lucky to learn anything really

You can shorten this by eliminating the "of artists like Radiohead" from the phrasing, and it will still be true of many businesses.

You'd think that when an organization shells out money to someone so they'll grab a domain name and set up a site for them, it would be for the org to have a depository for their content just like TBL intended—and they can piggyback off the ubiquity of the Web so those resources are retrievable/accessible with pretty low friction. Weirdly, a whole industry of people specializing in e.g. Wordpress or CSS-framework-du-jour have managed to pull some sleight of hand so that the world at large doesn't have expectations that are anything like that in mind and instead thinks that the purpose should rather be little more than something like a visually stunning brochure (or billboard) that's already out of date the day it's published—and everything the business relies on to actually operate and communicate will happen either through Facebook or is created in a facsimile of a 90s-style office suite and gets shuttled around via email or Google Drive (or simply never leaves the machine where it was created).

Pretty weird fuckin' milieu (and expensive), if we're being frank.

axlee• 3 years ago

PTM has won a Grammy, they don't need planners to get a sense of their style. If anything, GSheet might be their styles.

solardev• 3 years ago

We've gone full circle from Word home pages to spreadsheet ones now, yay

mocha_nate• 3 years ago

This looks so bad on mobile lol

cooper_ganglia• 3 years ago

Actually works well to get the points across (on desktop, at least), and is interesting from an artistic perspective. I enjoy it as an interesting anecdote, but it does make for a comparatively miserable browsing experience!

lazycouchpotato• 3 years ago

Haha that's funny. Surprisingly functional as well.

Website's definitely suffering in performance while having a grand total of .. 37 viewers.

Slow_Hand• 3 years ago

Now might be a good time to mention the band Vulfpeck's website, which is refreshingly stripped-down and no more flashy in it's design than Craigslist. Aside from it's custom typeface: https://www.vulfpeck.com/

The site is a little light on content right now because there's not much going on with the band, but going back in time you can see how crisp and functional the entire thing is, even when loaded with information: https://web.archive.org/web/20200417092603/https://vulfpeck....

computerfriend• 3 years ago

I really like Vulf Mono. More bands should make their own typeface.

wswope• 3 years ago

Similar one that I love from Nicolas Jaar with major indie-hacker vibes, albeit a less sick typeface:

https://nicolasjaar.net/

spookie• 3 years ago

I love his mixes, this is great!

6581• 3 years ago

which is refreshingly stripped-down

Until you look at the HTML source.

mattmcknight• 3 years ago

After years of dormancy, a surprising new chapter in the using <table> for layout debate emerges.

_shantaram• 3 years ago

I lol'd, thank you.

mmanfrin• 3 years ago

RETVRN

divbzero• 3 years ago

The most adept practitioners can create pixel-perfect bitmaps by minimizing column widths and row heights and tweaking background color cell by cell.

user3939382• 3 years ago

Someone implemented Doom in Excel https://youtu.be/J2qU7t6Jmfw

dackerlunghack• 3 years ago

  Please try to understand us
  We’ve said goodbye to Kansas
  Since time immemorial
  (hyperbole, millennial!)
  <table> has been my <canvas>

inopinatus• 3 years ago

With slightly larger granularity, and for somewhat more mundane purposes, it's also a neat way to present QR codes. Especially good for QR codes via email, since no attachment is required and almost every client supports tables.

ivlad2• 3 years ago

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror.

kibwen• 3 years ago

...and were suddenly set to `display: none;`

gardenhedge2• 3 years ago

While this site has some similarities to reddit, HN is not reddit.

Yhippa• 3 years ago

Spreadsheets: the original no-code platform. I like it. Infinitely scalable, easy to update. Most of the time when I go to an artist's site it's to find tour dates or merch. This does both okay.

flatline• 3 years ago

About that scaling…

I’ve seen workflows with data chunked out into multiple excel files because the results exceeded the row limit (4 million?) Going through all that by hand was a pain, and it took hours to go from a flat file format to spreadsheets. Parquet took this down to seconds, and provided a rich data analysis API.

Spreadsheets scale for small to medium-ish workflows and are very much a drag for anything remotely “big.”

ashu1461• 3 years ago

Can we implement a locking mechanism with purely using google sheets ? Example think of a hotel room booking system

foota• 3 years ago

Lol, I wonder if this has caused issues for Google

eep_social• 3 years ago

I’m sure it’s slamming a (hopefully very) fast cache since the load is all read.

pests2• 3 years ago

The Sheets UI is showing only about ~33 viewers.

smcleod2• 3 years ago

I really enjoy Portugal. The Man, so many good days in the sun playing their music over the years.

Apocryphon2• 3 years ago

A fun funky idea. Sad I can’t think of a ton of HN worthy ideas of musical acts making newsworthy tech-empowered quirky choices. The last thing that comes to mind is Radiohead making In Rainbows pay-what-you-want.

plugin-baby• 3 years ago

What about when U2’s new album appeared on iPods automatically?

Apocryphon2• 3 years ago

True. It was newsworthy, albeit in a cringeworthy way.

Geezus_422• 3 years ago

This is why I was never interested in U2. I'm sure they made great stuff before I was born, but my primary exposure to them as a kid was Apple iPod ads. It turned me off them and I have ignored their existence ever since.

vlunkr3• 3 years ago

One Hacker Band is a robot band that plays real instruments.

Vulfpeck fans won’t shut up about the fact that the band made their own font.

aylmao• 3 years ago

They're playing with Good Kid!

A few years back I was in a tech interview in San Francisco, and after the fact I hung out with other candidates in the city. One of them was from Canada and told us he played in a band. This is the band! Happy to see this project still going strong and gaining traction!

ckbishop• 3 years ago

Idea shamelessly lifted from Zack Fox.

https://zackfox.com/

anderber• 3 years ago

It looks like John Gurley has a GoFundMe to help research a treatment/cure for his daughter's genetic mutation: https://gofund.me/d012bb5b

dools• 3 years ago

It’s a pet peeve of mine how selectively the “don’t editorialise headlines” guideline is enforced

HellsMaddy• 3 years ago

The title accurately describes what's interesting about the submission, no hyperbole or clickbait. What's wrong with that?

andybak• 3 years ago

Nothing. That's the point.

jlund-molfese• 3 years ago

There’s a difference between headlines and page titles imo. A (good) headline already tells you what’s interesting about a link, whereas a page title may or may not.

alin233• 3 years ago

I also have an iOS published app that has a Google Sheets “backend”: https://subsol.one

It’s an app for finding parties and festivals in Romania, and the sheets choice makes it super easy for my brother and his friends to add parties to the app.

I thought about adding a “real” database and tried some apps/frontends for them, but nothing made it easy enough to update and insert rows for non technical people.

I figured I could just download and cache the Sheets CSV, and use that for the database.

PS: the app is the one I had trouble getting published because the App Store reviewers deemed it“too simple”: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Dealing-with-App-Store-reject...

wingerlang• 3 years ago

Sameish here. I made hundreds of flashcards and other "matrixes" of data, this is pulled each time I build the app, which then converts the csv to json and stored in the app.

I also write articles in Sketch, because the app is heavy on illustrations. Using sketch allows me to draw the images directly while writing the articles. It is then sliced and exported into the app through a custom plugin.

quelltext• 3 years ago

Websites or apps backed by a sheet or some other minimalist setup are fairly common. What's noteworthy about the submission is that the website is a sheet, not a layer to render info from one.

ziolko• 3 years ago

You can easily turn a spreadsheet into a small CRUD database with HTTP API using Google Apps Script. I've shared an example a few years ago: https://spreadapi.roombelt.com/setup.

marwis• 3 years ago

How's the performance?

lovasoa12• 3 years ago

For your next app backend, you should try SQLPage [1][2]

It makes creating a small web form to feed your database as easy as

    SELECT 'form' AS component;
    SELECT name, label, type FROM form_fields;

    INSERT INTO parties(name, date) VALUES(:name, :date);

And creating an api on top of that db as simple as:

    SELECT 'json' AS component, 
      (SELECT JSON_GROUP_ARRAY(JSON_OBJECT('name', name, 'date', date)) FROM parties) AS contents;

[1] https://sql.ophir.dev/ [2] https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLPage

raybb3• 3 years ago

I like the idea of this a lot, but does it provide any way to edit the data?

alin233• 3 years ago

Thanks for building this, and for the sample code :)

Although what sheets excels at is batch editing and collaboration, which is really hard to get in an SQL frontend. My brother usually runs a Raycast workflow I wrote for him to extract a small number of party data as TSV which gets copied in clipboard. Then in sheets he can just paste that to get full rows and columns populated.

After that he and his friends start proof reading and cross referencing social media data for each row, and Sheets makes this super easy as they can see each row highlighted with each user’s color so they don’t step on each other’s toes.

Your solution is still very good for other use cases and I think I already have one in mind. My father always wanted to maintain a list of up-to-date prices for the vegetables that sell in my hometown’s large wholesale market.

stavros2• 3 years ago

This looks really good, but I had to pass on it because I couldn't find screenshots or, even better, a demo site. I think that would really help sell this.

JopV• 3 years ago

Take a look at SeaTable.

devmor• 3 years ago

Your choice is a reasonable one! I have built entire CMS systems that pull data for thousands of users from sharepoint spreadsheets.

Realtors and doctors, mostly.

dhruvarora013• 3 years ago

I made something very similar for our company's internal directory. HR is used to maintaining Google Sheets and fit really well into their workflow

coldtrait• 3 years ago

I love your website. The design and aesthetics is so pleasing.

reynoldsbd• 3 years ago

Love it when a band does something weird or interesting with their website. My favorite is The Strokes:

https://www.thestrokes.com/

notRobot• 3 years ago

There's also https://redfoo.com/

babyshake• 3 years ago

This makes me want to see an electronic act with a Github repo for their website containing markdown docs for tour, merch, etc.

Geezus_422• 3 years ago

You're giving me ideas haha

low_tech_punk• 3 years ago

truly headless CMS

d0tn3t• 3 years ago

truly CMSless head

lionkor• 3 years ago

And a huge cookie popup and a massive signup banner

vk6flab• 3 years ago

I'm surprised that Google Sheets hasn't been throttled on that url yet.

At one point I provided live tracking data to a popular event site using Google Sheets and advised their web team to create a local cache of the data and refresh it every 10 minutes. Instead they ignored that advice and included the document itself into the home-page. The document was hugged to death within about 30 minutes of going live on a four day event and it took days for Google to increase their throttle, at which point it didn't matter any more, since the event was over.

I realise that Google has infrastructure to handle this load, but an international event, with a (then) Google Apps account, was unable to make enough noise at Google to fix things in a timely manner.

runeks3• 3 years ago

I'm surprised that Google Sheets hasn't been throttled on that url yet.

It is for me. I get a banner saying some features are disabled due to high traffic.

martinsmit• 3 years ago

Similar to Hyukoh's[1], although it is actually multiple documents. P.TM seem to have gone all in, which is neat.

[1] http://www.hyukoh.com/

spacecadet• 3 years ago

I once made a google sheets social network facebook clone, just because I thought I could. Shared with some friends (who each got a protected tab). It was dumb.

shmde• 3 years ago

"Some tools not available due to huge traffic." Why is gdocs shitting itself while handling 28 concurrent users just viewing a doc ?

somewhereoutth5• 3 years ago

"A country is a group of people," guitar player and vocalist John Gourley explains. "With Portugal, it just ended up being the first country that came to mind. The band's name is 'Portugal'. The period is stating that, and 'The Man' states that it's just one person" (any one of the band members).

I'm not expecting a lot from their song writing after this statement.

_xe9h2• 3 years ago

I'm not expecting a lot from their song writing after this statement.

They are actually quite a well-known band, so you shouldn’t be so cynical. People on HN love to judge things before they know anything about it. This band has won a Grammy award, but you were content to assume the worst for trivial reasons.

somewhereoutth5• 3 years ago

A band name is not trivial. It doesn't seem they spent any time or effort thinking up a good one (unless of course there is a marketing angle here, and the name (and band?) was entirely manufactured).

garganzol• 3 years ago

The problem with this website is that it's filled with popups suggesting to accept cookies, privacy, and stuff. Before I ever see an unobstructed web page, I have to perform about two or three clicks accompanied with intimidating text descriptions.

The more clicks the better, right? More clicks is a sure sign of improved engagement. But seriously, it is not.

budgi4• 3 years ago

The issue you describe is a general one driven by regulation and not specific to this website

latexr• 3 years ago

driven by regulation

It’s driven by privacy invasive practices from the services. I have never created a website that showed popups or required people to “accept” anything, because I respect the people who visit them. The websites who say they “value your privacy” while at the same time revealing they have “1542 partners” (yes, really) they share your data with are the problem.

It’s as if the milk industry were peeing in your milk, a law passed saying they could only do that with consent, and you complained of all the pee warnings being driven by regulation. I mean, technically the warning are only there because of regulation, but the law isn’t the thing to criticise there, the behaviour which lead to it is.

rabbits_2002• 3 years ago

seems very difficult to use on mobile. i suppose it doesnt matter since most people buy tickets through third parties.

branon• 3 years ago

This would be a decent idea if the mobile site wasn't terrible

JoshGG• 3 years ago

If you click on the Tab 'FRANCES CHANGED MY LIFE' it shows that band members John and Zoe have a daughter Frances. They're raising money to fund research into Frances' rare neurological disease:

"Frances has a rare genetic mutation that causes a degenerative disease called DHDDS. In the last few years, breakthroughs in medical science have made it possible to develop a treatment. Unfortunately, it's extremely expensive. We are telling Frances’story in hopes of raising enough donations to fund her treatment."

https://www.chrisblackchangedmylife.com/donate

Hopefully the HN traffic boost can help drive some donations and new research into treating neurological diseases. Donate!

lovasoa12• 3 years ago

These things always make me uneasy. On the one hand, I understand they are in a very hard situation. On the other hand, donating to research into rare neurological diseases will literally save hundreds of times fewer lives than donating to "effective" charities (https://www.effectivealtruism.org/)

vlunkr3• 3 years ago

That’s some harsh utilitarianism.

rafram• 3 years ago

Effective altruism has worked out pretty well, hasn’t it?

ivalm2• 3 years ago

Not all lives have the same subjective utility to the donor. When pressed into making a choice I think most would rather save their own child’s life than a million random children in Africa. If someone likes the band I imagine the donor would feel more utility in helping them than saving a greater amount of people they have no connection to.

seattle_spring4• 3 years ago

Sam Bankman-Fried did a pretty great job proving how awful "effective altruism" can end up.

Believe in something? Donate your time. Donate your money.

jaw• 3 years ago

As a fellow fan of effective altruism, I really don't want people to think of it as the group that shows up whenever someone is asking for help and says "Don't help them! You should be helping these other people instead!"

Empathy is crucial for motivating people to give to any cause, and it's a crucial part of why I'm involved in EA. If someone's first/main exposure to EA is along the lines of "you should ignore this cause which touched your heart, because numbers", it's not going to resonate. I want people to be excited about the good they could accomplish by donating to EA-aligned charities, not feel like I'm trying to press some distasteful obligation onto them.

Also, it's not a zero-sum game in practice. People can be inspired to increase the total amount they give (so giving more to effective charities doesn't necessarily mean giving less to other charities they care about).

sizzle• 3 years ago

Why isn’t the band doing a charity tour to donate the proceeds. The fans can pay to enjoy the music and the band donates a boatload of $ to the cause that is near and dear to them.

demarq• 3 years ago

It’s over for frontend devs, no code has won

sirsinsalot2• 3 years ago

If only.

FFP999• 3 years ago

So that would be Portugal. The Man. The Website. The Google Sheet.

Thanks very much I'm here all week, try the Beef Wellington.

seattle_spring4• 3 years ago

Reminds me of "Coupon: The Movie: The Ride" https://youtu.be/LLnoLmCqT30

alfnor• 3 years ago

Since it loads everything at once, navigation is very snappy, which I really like. I'd rather let the whole thing load once than wait every time I click an internal link.

gardenhedge2• 3 years ago

This doesn't work well on mobile devices. Hopefully it doesn't become a trend.

nunez• 3 years ago

Fucking incredible.

adv0r• 3 years ago

FYI they are rising money to save their kid https://gofund.me/d012bb5b the tech side is fun but the most important link is hidden and I see very few donations rolling it for it to be home the HN front page

hirenj• 3 years ago

If anyone is wondering, this looks a bit like a syndromic set of phenotypes resulting from the mutation(s) in DHDDS. The mutations are hitting a really bad part in the glycosylation pathways, where I can imagine impacts on a massive number of proteins. I’m assuming this is a hypomorph, as if you lost function of this gene completely, it’s hard to see how any cell can survive.

kstrauser• 3 years ago

No one was wondering that about Portugal. The Man’s website.

wrayjustin• 3 years ago

From the website:

https://www.chrisblackchangedmylife.com/donate

throw555chip• 3 years ago

I got, "Some tools might be unavailable due to heavy traffic in this file.".

Floralegeium• 3 years ago

If anyone is interested one of the founding members Dewey Halpaus has a podcast called Peer Pleasure Podcast.

He interviews other bands and often speak about his time touring and going through the music industry. I believe in addition to the podcast he also works a tradesman in Oregon.

Great Idea for Anyone who just needs to point people in a direction to find them.

Portugal. The Man – Official Website Is a Google Sheets Document

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