What this is

Within Ten is a free, automated guide to what's happening within ten miles: village news, public library events, park district programs, and school-district calendars, pulled together per town and rebuilt automatically several times a week. Currently live for Mount Prospect (60056), Arlington Heights (60005), Des Plaines (60016), and Palatine (60067), Illinois, with more towns planned.

Who publishes it

Within Ten is written and run by a local parent. It started as a way to answer one recurring question — what's actually happening around here this weekend — without spending an evening checking half a dozen different village, library, and park district calendars by hand.

Why it exists

A full-time job and two small kids leave almost no time for hand-curating a weekly guide, so the whole thing had to be automated from the start rather than written by hand each week. Most "things to do this weekend" guides are written once and go stale the moment they're published; this one rebuilds itself from real sources automatically, so it stays current without anyone having to remember to update it.

How it's built

Every region page is generated from the same real, publicly available village, library, park district, and school-district sources — nothing here is invented to fill space, and a source that goes quiet just means fewer listings that week, never a fabricated one. The whole site is open source; the code that builds it is public on GitHub.

Questions or corrections

Have a correction, a local event to suggest, or a question about how this works? Submit it on GitHub, or if you're a local business, see the sponsor page.