EDIT (3/3/26): Made several further site updates. Including new advanced search fields, and another URL change.
The latest update to Databruce took a bit longer than I had initially intended, and comes with a ton of changes. Under the hood, nearly every part of the site has received an update of some kind, and I even considered jumping to “v1.2” (the version numbers are made up just like the points and don’t matter). Although, for the sake of consistency, this will be “v1.14”, or the “February 2026” update, it doesn’t matter.
URL Changes
In probably the biggest change this month, all URLs that previously used numerical IDs now use UUIDs.
3/3 UPDATE: User profiles now also use UUIDs. This was a larger than expected change, and while I did test plenty there might be something that broke. Please get in touch via the sites contact form if you encounter any bugs.
The main reason for this is to (hopefully) reduce the amount of bot traffic the site receives. As before with numerical incrementing IDs, it’s easy for a scraper to guess the pattern and hit every page of the site. Though up until now, my response has simply been to send them elsewhere, using UUIDs is a better and more “proper” way to do it as they can’t be guessed in the same way.
However, I find the “redirect” approach funny and will keep that in place.
Because of the change, any bookmarks/links to specific detail pages will no longer work. The event detail page hasn’t changed, and keeps the “Jerrybase” id format (YYYYMMDD-XX).
Layout/Design Updates
One thing to know about me is that I am very much not a designer, having only rudimentary knowledge picked up from my time designing themes for RetroPie/EmulationStation nearly a decade ago (somehow).
The design of the site is largely me just sticking things together in a way that looks decent and makes sense to me. Alternatively, I lift parts from sites I like and create my own bastardized version.
This month, I went through and tweaked the layout of many pages. Not drastically, and in many cases it’s unnoticeable. The most notable change is the base font size is smaller, and the padding on tables has been reduced. I also managed to finally fix horizontal table scrolling so it works and doesn’t break everything.
Below are some examples, with the exception of the event detail page (to be covered in it’s own section), the differences are slight.
The theme colors have also received slight tweaks. The dark theme has a darker background which makes the cards “pop” a bit more.
DataTables Fixes/Changes
Datatables are both very useful and very frustrating. Useful because it saves me from having to develop a table from scratch with sorting/filtering capabilities, frustrating because of how it does certain things in a somewhat obtuse way.
One of the bigger “pain points” with it is that no matter what, horizontal scrolling broke mobile layouts. Causing pages to extend well past the screen bounds, and breaking layouts entirely.
In the past, I tried a few different approaches to get around this, each having tradeoffs. But, it “fixed” the broken layouts caused by horizontal table scrolling, so these tradeoffs were acceptable, if not ideal.
Although, I decided it was time to fix this issue.
Tables Now Scroll (Finally)
While DataTables have a “horizontal scrolling” setting, it presented the issue of breaking layouts when active. The workaround involved setting the max-width of the scrollable element manually. Which appears to have fixed the issue, and now gives mobile users the same experience as desktop.
Improved Sorting
Sorting options until now simply involved clicking/tapping the column header to switch between ascending/descending order for a column. Additionally, it was possible to sort by multiple columns…on desktop only, as it involved sorting one column and then shift-clicking additional columns.
The sorting has been changed to instead use columnControl, which keeps the simple “ordering” icon, but adds the option to multi-column sort.
This option is a bit more intuitive, as well as now allowing mobile users the ability to sort by multiple columns at once.
Event Detail Changes
This page received the most drastic changes overall, both in it’s layout/design, as well as features.
First, the links in the main card (brucebase/nugs) now open in a new tab by default.
I wasn’t happy with how squished and busy the right column was, having the event notes, onstage list, album breakdown, and links. The event notes even needed a popup modal to show notes longer than a sentence. This wouldn’t do.
The basic layout remains the same, just laid out a bit nicer, and everything has a bit more breathing room. Changes of note:
Onstage
Onstage has been moved to a separate tab, which accommodates those events where everyone and Bruce’s mother was onstage, even adding a “guest” check to visually mark guests vs band members. That guest marker was always present, there just wasn’t a way to show it nicely in the old layout.
Album Breakdown
Album Breakdown has been completely redone with a better more compact layout, as well as removing the clunky popup modal.
The songs belonging to each album can be seen by clicking/tapping on the album row, which will expand the list of songs below. There is also a button which will expand/collapse all rows at once.
The formula has also been changed. Originally, songs were tallied by count over the largest song album count, which in hindsight doesn’t make a ton of sense. The count is now number of songs from album divided by total setlist songs, with a percentage also shown as well.
If an album is “complete”, meaning all songs on it were played, then a “complete” badge is listed next to the album. I have many “that isn’t possible…unless” ideas, this being one of them.
Setlist Table
Like the rest, this table now scrolls horizontally to show all columns. Which I think works better than dropping most of the columns for a “mobile” layout.
This card is also slightly narrower to allow for that larger right column. One would think this would be a negative, but the change is essentially unnoticeable. Especially with overall smaller table font size/padding.
Also, I’ve changed how I handle setlist notes, and they show up more reliably now. Additionally, guests are now grouped by band when possible.
Search Improvements
Advanced Search
Rewrite
Advanced search has been redone, as it was a mess underneath. From the beginning I’ve considered this to be a constant “work in progress” type feature. As I simply can’t account for every possible query that someone could run.
With this rewrite, advanced search has seen a noticeable speedup. It’s hardly a “scientific” comparison, but I did try a few queries side by side.
- Events on monday:
- Local: 300ms
- Remote: 500ms
- Events with Patti Scialfa
- Local: 500ms
- Remote: 850ms
- Events in New Jersey:
- Local: 530ms
- Remote: 1.03sec
These numbers are simply to give an idea of the improvement. I’m comparing a single user local machine vs a limited and busy remote VPS, so please take these numbers with a grain of salt. I do believe that if I can convert this search to fully serverside then there will be an even bigger improvement, however that is speculation.
New Search Fields (NEW - 3/3/26)
The following search fields have been added to the advanced search:
- Tour Leg
- Event Type
- Setlist Search
- Premiere
- Tour Debut
- No Bruce
- Sign Request
Setlist Note Search
For reasons difficult to explain, this originally didn’t search all setlist notes, but only those present on the setlist. The short version is that the setlist has “static” notes, and a separate view/table has “dynamic” notes. The difference being “Solo Acoustic” vs “First Time Played by E Street Band”.
I switched from a view and table to a single materialized view. This has all of the static/generated notes, and is much faster to search.
Event Calendar
Official Releases are now shown on the calendar. The release date is simply first release, and doesn’t account for re-releases. I plan to also add Nugs releases at some point as well.
A bug was also fixed with the event runs taking too long to load due to an error with the filter parameters.
All links on the calendar now open in a new tab by default.
User Profile
All of the songs tables now show first/last event per song. Also with this update, the tables on this page now use serverside rendering, which speeds up page loading, as well as giving me more control over sorting/searching.
Setlist Slots
The various “setlist slot” tables now hide columns when they’re empty. Some tours follow a “Show/Encore” structure, and earlier ones (up through 1993) followed a “Set 1/Set 2/Encore” structure. For the later shows, having empty columns for sets that aren’t there is a waste of space.
Theme Toggle Button
The theme switch control has been changed from a menu to a button that swaps the theme. I found the menu annoying while testing, as I’m usually switching back and forth often, and I rarely have a full window open. A simple dark/light button is quicker and easier to use. The “auto” theme has also been removed, however your preference should still be stored in browser.
Fixes and Other Things That Don’t Fit Elsewhere
A full list is present in the “changelog.md” file on the sites Github repository.
- The contact form now shows a message upon submitting. I also modified it to log submissions, simply so I have a record of messages if the email fails to send.
- Links on most pages now match the primary site color.
- DataTable searching/ordering/filtering functions have been redone from scratch. Allowing for multicolumn sort as well as column/global regex search.
- Home Page setlist now shows position indicators and stat badges.
- Notes now show on the “release detail” page.
- All releases are now grouped by disc, defaulting to Disc # unless there is a named disc (Tracks 2, Elec. Nebraska, etc.).
- (NEW 3/3) Events now show if they were rescheduled/cancelled/relocated. Additionally, all events of these types now have notes linking to the new event.
Closing
This ended up much longer than I had planned. Both due to how many updates were made, and how much I had to say about each. I believe this is the biggest single update since the initial public launch in June 2025.
If you’ve read this far, thanks. I also want to thank everyone who has used the site, and for taking a chance on it. So far, there are about 90 active users, which is great. I only want the site to get better from here, so if you have any comments/feedback/questions/suggestions, please get in touch and let me know.
Thanks!
Lilbud (March 1, 2026)