Akron Akron Pulse covers Summit County, which is more ground than any one person cares about. The settings in this guide are how you cut that down to the version of the calendar you would actually keep open. They take about two minutes and then you never think about them again.
Set your community
This one comes with a catch worth knowing up front: My Community lives in the installed app, not the website. If you have not added Akron Pulse to your home screen yet, do that first and the picker shows up in the nav. It asks you once on your first launch.
Pick the neighborhood or the city you actually live in. Highland Square, North Hill, Downtown, Cuyahoga Falls, Kenmore, and so on down the list. From then on the app remembers it. The nav carries a My Community button that goes straight to that community's page, and a long press on the app icon has a shortcut to it, so you are one tap from your own neighborhood without setting it again.
Worth knowing how this works, because it is different from most sites. We do not use zip codes. Zip codes cut through neighborhoods in ways that make no sense to anybody who lives here, and a zip radius will happily tell you a bar on the other side of a highway is your local spot. We use actual neighborhood boundaries and the venue's real coordinates. When the site says an event is in North Hill, it means it is in North Hill.
Be clear about what it does though. A community page is a filter, not a preference. While you are on it you are seeing that neighborhood and nothing else. That is usually what you want on a Tuesday, and it is exactly what you do not want when you are looking for something big happening across town, so head back to the full list when the question changes.
Set the audience toggle
In the filter tray there is a control with two settings, Everyone and Hide kids and family. It exists because the calendar serves two people who want opposite things.
- If you do not have kids, story hours and school carnivals are noise. Turn them off and a surprising amount of clutter goes away, especially on weekend mornings.
- If you do have kids, you want the opposite, and the family category filter is the fastest way to get a list where everything on it is something you could bring a six year old to.
Exclude the categories you are never going to
Category chips cycle. First tap includes, second tap excludes, third tap clears. Exclusion is the one people never find, and it is the more useful half.
Be honest with yourself here. If you have never once gone to a networking event, exclude it. If sports are not your thing, exclude them. Two or three exclusions is usually enough to make the feed feel like it was built for you, and unlike including a category, excluding one does not narrow you into a corner. You still get everything else, including the stuff you would not have thought to search for.
Save it, do not redo it
The community setting sticks on its own once you pick it. The filters are a different mechanism: they live in the URL, which is better than it sounds, because it means a set of filters is a thing you can save.
- Set the audience toggle.
- Exclude your two or three dead categories.
- Add whatever else fits, a price cap, a date range.
- Bookmark the page. The bookmark holds every one of those settings.
That bookmark is a better front page than our front page. If you want the same treatment for your inbox, the newsletter preferences go quite a bit deeper than this.