The situation
emus keeps the calendar for improvised, experimental and exploratory music in Sydney, and sends a newsletter about it. It ran on Squarespace, with the newsletter on Mailchimp: two subscriptions, two logins, and an archive of events reaching back to 2017 that only lived inside Squarespace.
What I did
I pulled every event out of Squarespace and rebuilt the site as a fast static site on Cloudflare, with an editor in the browser. Adding a gig can start from pasting a link; venues autocomplete. There's a calendar, a full archive, a map, a filter by venue, search, a photo gallery, a submit-an-event form, and a calendar feed people can subscribe to.
Every old newsletter link still works: 2,640 of them redirect to the right page. Event images moved to Cloudflare's storage, which took the site build from 637 MB down to 62 MB.
The newsletter left Mailchimp in September 2026 for Currawong, my own newsletter service. The contacts came with it, and so did everyone who had ever unsubscribed or bounced, so none of them get mailed again. (Mailchimp's export doesn't include the sending history, though. That stays in their account.)
How it turned out
The Squarespace site was switched off on 29 March 2026. About 3,100 events now live in a calendar the organiser edits herself, and the domain renewal dropped from $49 to $25.20 a year along the way.
