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), Palatine (60067), and Wheeling (60090), Illinois, with more towns planned.
Who publishes it
Within Ten is written and run by Ryan Anderson, 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. This build reached 24 of 30 configured sources — the rest is a source that didn't answer this time, not a gap filled with a fabricated listing.
Nothing on this site is written by AI. Every listing comes from the village, library, park district, or school district's own calendar, and every event links back to the source that published it — not a summary written about it. The build does apply light editorial processing on top of that real data: it tags events (kid-friendly, free, indoor/outdoor and so on) from keywords in the title and description, truncates an overly long description, and picks which event to feature — but it never writes, rewrites, or invents the listing text itself.
What we list
We don't list party or campaign meetings; we do list voting information.
See us first on Google
If you use Google Search, you can add Within Ten as a preferred source. Google then shows our pages more prominently, and labels them as one of your sources, when you search for local events. It is a setting on your own Google account, and we get no personal information from it.
Questions or corrections
See something wrong or missing? Email us or reply to the newsletter if you're a subscriber — corrections get made the same week. You can also submit a new local event on GitHub, or if you're a local business, see the sponsor page.