If you’re a new act, or if you’ve just never created an input list before, you may have some questions about what to do. It’s not that input lists are hyper-complicated creatures, but building one isn’t necessarily an instinctive act. You might wonder about what information to include that will actually be relevant for a venue tech. You might also wonder about what kind of formatting to do for the list.

…and, even though input lists aren’t huge documents, you still might look at that blank page in your word processor or text editor and go, “I don’t WANNA!”

(I’ve been there. I sympathize.)

Well, I’ve built a web-based utility that might be helpful for you.

The Input Listerizer is a web form that asks you for information about your act that I, as a small-venue tech, have found useful over the years. When you’ve put all that info in and clicked on the arrow that submits the form, the utility parses what you’ve provided. When it finishes, you get a nicely formatted input list and monitor patch.

At that point, you have some options. You can manually print the output page, if you like (making sure to enable the printing of backgrounds so that all the formatting comes across). You can also grab the request URL from the output page. The cool thing about the request URL is that dropping it into a web browser should regenerate your input list inside that web browser. In this era of tablets and smartphones, this can be a pretty handy thing – and it saves a bit of a tree, too.

Here’s the link: inputlisterizer.smallvenuesurvivalist.com

I’ve tried my best to debug The Input Listerizer, but there’s always that one “edge case” that gets away. If you discover a bug, have a feature request, or otherwise want to tell me something about the utility, please use the comment system available from this post’s dedicated page.

Here’s hoping that you find this little project to be useful!