Welcome to the Hook’s new online concert calendar. We’ve slaved for ages over the functionality, and we hope you will utilize it.

Feeds

Every day we update one RSS feed for our favorite events and another for all the shows in town. The feeds are purged of past events every morning, so you can get super-cool one-click access to the day’s concerts using the “Live Bookmarks” feature in Firefox and Safari.

There’s also a feed for non-Calendar content so you can get your daily music fix without having to first wade through too many depressing news stories.

iCal

Every concert in town gets an entry in our constantly-updated iCal web calendar, which you can view with Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Mozilla Sunbird, and Microsoft Outlook, among others.

Audio

We can attach MP3 files to our event listings, and there’s an awesome Flash music player on the left side of every page which will give you one-click access to all the music we have for the next 30 days. Once a show has passed, its songs are automatically removed, so the remaining tracks move up toward the top of the playlist as the show gets closer.

On the right, you’ll find smaller one-shot MP3 playback devices which can also be used to find out which posts have audio content. The audio feed also podcasts those files — most of them, at least — so subscribing in iTunes or any other podcast-friendly application will put a playlist for the day’s concerts on your iPod every morning.

Pages and Comments

Every concert is given a discrete page so you can email a link to friends or post it on your band’s MySpace page.

Each page includes a commenting function for discussions both before and after the show, and you can follow all the gossip either by using the comments feed or by keeping an eye on the comments section at the bottom of the front page.

Bookmark http://readthehook.com/music to stay up to date on all the best concerts in town, or submit your own for inclusion.