otc-curl

name	otc-curl
description	Query the On the Cheap network (charlotteonthecheap.com, milehighonthecheap.com and ~12 sister city sites) from the shell with curl and jq — daily local event listings with times/prices/venues, plus searchable articles on free and cheap things to do. Use when the user wants local event or deal data and the onthecheap MCP server is not available.

On the Cheap via curl

The "on the Cheap" sites are public WordPress sites with open REST APIs and no bot wall, so they are read directly with curl — no API key, no login, no browser bridge. Nothing needs installing beyond curl and jq.

If the onthecheap MCP server is available, prefer its tools; they handle the date-format, truncation and category-id traps below for you. This skill is the fallback.

# Pick a city — every site below works identically.
BASE=https://www.charlotteonthecheap.com     # charlotte
# BASE=https://www.milehighonthecheap.com    # denver
# BASE=https://triangleonthecheap.com        # raleigh/durham/chapel hill
# also: atlanta, chicago, columbus, greaterseattle, kansascity, miami,
#       orlando, portlandliving, rva, southernmaine  (all *onthecheap.com)
UA='onthecheap-skill (+https://github.com/chrischall/onthecheap-mcp)'

Articles — JSON

# Search (slim fields; drop _fields for full records). $EXPIRED is resolved below.
curl -sA "$UA" "$BASE/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?search=free+museum&per_page=10&categories_exclude=$EXPIRED&_fields=id,slug,date,link,title,excerpt" | jq -r '.[] | "\(.date[0:10])  \(.title.rendered)"'

# One article by slug
curl -sA "$UA" "$BASE/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?slug=<slug>" | jq -r '.[0].content.rendered'

# Filter ids
curl -sA "$UA" "$BASE/wp-json/wp/v2/categories?per_page=100&orderby=count&order=desc&_fields=id,slug,count" | jq -r '.[] | "\(.id)\t\(.count)\t\(.slug)"'

Always exclude the expired category — and look its id up first. Retired deals are parked there (a third to two-thirds of a site's posts), so without the filter you show the user offers that no longer exist.

The id differs on every site (2, 379, 4483, 6193, 7803, 16289, …), so never hardcode one — an id from another site matches nothing and silently disables the filter:

EXPIRED=$(curl -sA "$UA" "$BASE/wp-json/wp/v2/categories?slug=expired&_fields=id" | jq -r '.[0].id')
curl -sA "$UA" "$BASE/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?per_page=10&categories_exclude=$EXPIRED&_fields=date,title,link"

Titles and excerpts come back HTML-entity-encoded (’, —). See references/recipes.md for a decode filter.

Events — HTML

Events are not in the REST API (/wp-json/wp/v2/event → 404); they are parsed from rendered HTML. Every city site uses the same markup and routing (the national hub, livingonthecheap.com, has no local calendar).

# One day  — note the US M-D-YYYY order
curl -sLA "$UA" "$BASE/events/view-date/7-25-2026/"

# One month
curl -sLA "$UA" "$BASE/events/calendar/08-2026/"

The date format fails silently — get it right

The path is US M-D-YYYY, not ISO. An ISO date does not 404; it parses to a nonsense timestamp and renders January 1, 1970, so you get confidently wrong data:

/events/view-date/7-25-2026/    ->  Saturday, July 25, 2026   ✅
/events/view-date/2026-07-25/   ->  Thursday, January 1, 1970 ❌

Always confirm the h2.lotc-event heading matches the date you asked for.

Month pages are truncated

Each calendar cell shows at most four listings plus a +N more events link. For one August the grid rendered 124 listings against a true total of 510. Use the month view to find busy days, then fetch the day page for the complete schedule — never present the grid as the full month.

See references/recipes.md for ready-to-run extraction commands.