elmcity

I tried to be lazy and use yahoo pipes earlier but that didn't work out too well. The ical feed it generates leaves out almost everything useful - though the json it generates is pretty complete. Maybe I'll crank out the XSLT tomorrow. The r25 xml is pretty straight forward (though not as complete as I would like) - it will still create a nice rich datasource. - Bill Rawlinson

Please, don't do it on my account. Only do it if you need it too. - Cathy Levinson

no worries. the pipes approach was a failure. The xslt works ok; though my php script is currently failing to run on my webhost for an unknown reason at the moment so the transformation doesn't happen :( - Bill Rawlinson

the xml isn't as rich as I had hoped either, it doesn't have start/end times so all of my events are listed at 8pm (just a random selection for a defaul ttime). you can download the xslt at http://whyhuntington.com/events... - the one I use doesn't have any extra whitespace in it so that I can be sure my resultant ical feed is valid. - Bill Rawlinson

the "V" code in it is due to 2 things. The first is I wanted to filter out a bunch of event types (all the ifs) and second it seemed like the easiest way to filter them (though it is ugly). There is probably an easier way to do it with an xsl query on the xml before I even pass it into the transformer so all the extraneous stuff is ripped out. - Bill Rawlinson

Hey Bill. Is there a subset of event types you do want to capture, or is it just that you'd like to filter out certain events? - Jory Graham

Im pretty much identifying event types I don't want in the "public" calendar as I discover them. For instance the normal community member doesn't care when MKT 225 is holding its class, they don't care when some display is being setup (though they want to know when it is viewable).. etc. So as I discover them I was adding them to the "V". I just need to stick the xslt somewhere that can... more... - Bill Rawlinson

Thanks team, great job! At http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/service... (scroll to 9:30PM) you can see one example of the MySpace feature in use. I bookmarked http://myspace.com/jatobamusic with the tags trusted+indirect+feed and also filter=keene. This band has a bunch of upcoming appearances, but that's the only one in Keene and thus the only one selected by the filter for the Keene hub. - Jon Udell

LibraryThing works the same way. There aren't any library events for Keene, and typically aren't for smaller places, but those of you in bigger places should be able to find some. - Jon Udell

Nikita, I'm afraid Charles Dickens would disagree with your invention claim: http://bit.ly/trackable - Jory Graham

Yes, trackable is indeed a word. But inventing words is a good thing to do (http://blog.jonudell.net/2007...) -- so keep trying! - Jon Udell

okey, I'll go for a smaller achievement: I found a word that Firefox dictionary /thinks/ does not exist ^^ - Nikita Pchelin

sweet this is great. Thanks for the myspace as this lets me pull in pretty much every live music event going on in our town since a guy has setup a myspace page specifically for tracking all live bands in Huntington. It's a good day for me in calendar land. - Bill Rawlinson

well boo - the myspace page no longer shows the calendar and the owner of the page is equally disappointed. He says myspace changed its setup so that I have to log into the site to see the calendar. GAH that's annoying. Hopefully I can just convince him to start using an open calendar. - Bill Rawlinson

Bill, actually we are working on this - as long as it's open to all users of myspace we soon should be able to login before requesting calendar information. Stay tuned :) - Nikita Pchelin

Is there a way to restrict the radius for events on the LibraryThing feed? It seems the default is 5 miles and it pulls in things that are outside Berkeley. On the MySpace feed, it looks as though there is someone named Berkeley who has the page for http://www.myspace.com/berkele.... Is there a way to specify a place rather than a person? - Lance Knobel

[[[ Is there a way to restrict the radius for events on the LibraryThing feed? ]]] The radius= parameter is passed along silently so that should just work. - Jon Udell

Note that you can replace the header image by saying img=http://... in the metadata. (Also remember to set tz=Pacific, the Eventful stuff is local time but Upcoming isn't and most iCalendars won't be.) - Jon Udell

I'm going to get around to replacing the default header and the time. If you can modify the default rendering to open in a new window (or tab?), that would be great. - Lance Knobel

"If you can modify the default rendering to open in a new window (or tab?), that would be great" Doing that right now. - Jon Udell

You might want to hold off on the header image, this is a common need and I'm going to make a metadata declaration for it, something like img=none. - Jon Udell

Is there a slow cycle to poll for changes in the feed? I've added to the metadata thinks like tz, img (might change that following your latest comment), contact and title. - Lance Knobel

You can short-circuit it by sending a Twitter message. Start by putting twitter=YOUR_TWITTER_HANDLE into the metadata. The service, as @elmcity_azure, will follow you. Then you can send messages to it. The only message so far is "start" which means restart the cycle. The normal cycle is every 8 hours, but when you send that message you'll get a restart within 5 min. (... more... - Jon Udell

Clever. - Lance Knobel

So I'm going to have to test a few other things before rolling out that link-opening change, just so you know... - Jon Udell

OK, the links now open in a new window or new tab, depending on how you've set your browser's preferences. This will apply to all hubs, whether or not the default template has been modified -- so, for example, http://fallschurchtimes.com/calenda... has the new behavior now too. Thanks for pointing this out, Lance, it's a big improvement. If for some reason a hub wouldn't want this behavior we can arrange a way to suppress it for that hub. - Jon Udell

That's great. Thanks for pushing through that change. - Lance Knobel

Cool. I would be interested in how you included the iframe in wordpress. Did you create your own page template, or are you using a plugin? - Cathy Levinson

Interesting. I like the idea of feeding in possible hits in other data streams. I can live with the extraneous stuff. I just got curious. - Greg Martin

Here is the Pipe: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes.... It is currently scanning delicious, twitter, wordpress, and (irrelevant for our purposes) flickr. I only disconnected technorati. You can use it, btw, for a multiplexed feed for any search term, so the one that feeds into here is of course using elmcity. - Jon Udell

BTW the preferred way to bookmark that feed would be with url=http://events.berkeley.edu/index..., i.e. the human-readable flavor of the URL. You might also want to do category=berkeley or... - Jon Udell

...OK, I think I see what to do here. How about bookmarking the ICS variants of each of the tabs, e.g. http://events.berkeley.edu/index..., with url= pointing to the human-readable variant (i.e., minus /ical) and category= pointing to the tab's label (e.g. lectures). - Jon Udell

"Am I missing something?" No, it's completely typical. So much so that I have a slide about it: http://www.slideshare.net/judell... In this case there are ICS links for individual events, so a feed could be constructed by scraping them, but it would be much nicer to provide ICS counterparts to the RSS feeds. - Jon Udell

"how the UCB calendar came into being" I know that story very well. It was originally Bob Glushko's project in document engineering. I interviewed him about it, and his book, here: http://jonudell.net/udell.... I'll ask Bob if anybody there can switch on iCalendar feeds. They certainly have the structured data to support it, so it would be trivial if they wanted to do it. - Jon Udell

If we can get Bob Glushko or someone else to turn on the feeds, that would be great. Let me know what happens with him. - Lance Knobel

Looking at the now-reduced set of Berkeley events from Eventful and Upcoming (with the radius=5), it looks like something is pulling all the UCB events in there. - Lance Knobel

So maybe they syndicate to Eventful? That'd be way cool. - Jon Udell

Cool. Working now (6:21pm Mon Nov 9). Did you find something? - Michael Hyde

Actually it's probably not /fully/ working yet, but yes, I did find something, and am deploying the fix soon. - Jon Udell

took a couple days, but the event was fixed. i don't know if the owner fixed it or if eventful responded to our comments. - Dave Witzel

I would be interested in general purpose exclude capability so I could eliminate, say, open house listings or other commercial business-type "advertisement events" from the aggregation. Some kind of way to define filters "namedFilter=some-exclude-criteria" and then a way to apply a filter to a built-in source, e.g. Eventful or Upcoming - Michael Hyde

Bill raised the same point, and I'm going to write this up in more detail for my blog. Here are the top two things on my list, both of which are quite easy for us to do. - Jon Udell

Option 1: Add eventful=no and/or upcoming=no tags to your delicious metadata bookmark - Jon Udell

Option 2: Include eventful but exclude contributors to eventful. (And ditto for upcoming.) In this case, you could signal your exclusions by bookmarking the user pages on eventful or upcoming for those users you want to exclude, and then tagging exclude=yes. - Jon Udell

What are "user pages"? Is that like a profile page of a particular submitter or do you mean the URL(s) of particular event pages themselves? I could see benefits to supporting both. If the former, however, there's a problem when Eventful itself creates data grabbed from other sites such as openhomez.com or meetup.com, i.e. all those items "added by evdb". There is no "evdb" page to bookmark. Maybe extend option 1 to support "eventful=onlypublicusers"? - Michael Hyde

"Is that like a profile page of a particular submitter" Yes. In an earlier incarnation of elmcity I actually whitelisted them, and in fact that whitelist is still lying around: http://delicious.com/elmcity.... (As opposed to http://delicious.com/elmcity..., though evidently I never got that far.) - Jon Udell

"If the former, however, there's a problem when Eventful itself creates data grabbed from other sites such as openhomez.com or meetup.com" Again, very perceptive of you to notice that. You're quite right. - Jon Udell

"Maybe extend option 1 to support "eventful=onlypublicusers"?" Could do. However my feeling is that the vast majority of what user evdb contributes is valuable. Does everyone agree? If so, the question becomes how to most efficiently characterize the unwanted fraction. - Jon Udell

Interesting thread. Would it make sense to add a regex match for blacklisting an eventful/upcoming entry? That way should there be a repeating oevent or author, you could write a match string to filter it. It strikes me this might be a high bar for non-technical folks, but perhaps a simple "/Joe's place/" would suffice for most events. This could be extended to all calendars to help... more... - Greg Martin

[[[ Would it make sense to add a regex ]]] More likely just a plain string. FuseCal had a string to match for inclusion, and we do now too for the LibraryThing and MySpace parsers the Toronto and Michigan State students have build. There can also be a string for exclusion. But it'd be best to work from live examples, so feel free to note them as you encounter them. - Jon Udell

Consider a recurring series of Meetup events spanning into the future that are no longer valid (e.g. venue closed), and no access to delete the original source event (unreachable organizer). How can one distinguish these items? String match on event title alone may possibly match other similarly named events. How about exact matching both title AND calendar source? E.g. exclude=yes title="Tom's in Northborough Meetup" source="(eventful: Postal code 01532, United States)" - Michael Hyde from email

If it's a recurring event on Eventful or Upcoming, I think it'll have a base URL that's discoverable from any instance. Will have to check, but if so you could just bookmark that base URL and tag it with exclude. This wouldn't apply to Meetup, since its iCalendar feeds are already directly addressable. But it would be good to come up with some concrete examples on Eventful and Upcoming... more... - Jon Udell

I don't believe it's a recurring event after all. It's a Meetup event with the same name, scheduled several times going forward. Eventful shows it created by "evdb", and gives a details link to the Meetup event. I have two such "stale" meetup threads, totalling 10 events. Haven't yet figured out how to do exclude=yes. The short eventful URL from the elmcity html?... more... - Michael Hyde

I would have thought either the short Eventful URL or the longer one it redirects to. However I'm not yet finding, via the API, a path to the canonical event that is the seed of the recurrence. Will investigate further. - Jon Udell

OK, it /is/ a recurring event, in the sense that it happens weekly. But not in the sense defined by an iCalendar RRULE (recurrence rule), or the equivalent in Eventful. I never noticed this before, but it looks like Meetup just emits a series of independently-defined events for each group. There is however the group's base URL: http://www.meetup.com/Toms-in.... We just need... more... - Jon Udell

I guess another option would be exclude=meetup in the hub's configuration, if you know that you never want eventful or upcoming to pass along stuff they've picked up from that source. - Jon Udell

Of course we're fast approaching that classic design conundrum: How do you give expert users everything they want without scaring off novice users? My general answer is to make things progressively discoverable. Here that might mean that we'd go ahead and put in this feature but not mention it in the FAQ, at least not right away, and rely on the existence of this forum for progressive revelation of knowledge that most people won't be looking for right away. - Jon Udell

Best for me would be to exclude Meetups as specified by group's base URL -- the "authoritative source.". Reason to exclude their event(s) is because the organizer isn't maintaining accuracy of their own listings. When the data accuracy returns, we can let them back in. (This also presumes that Eventful will be fairly responsive to changes at the original source; Eventful does seems to... more... - Michael Hyde

I guess that excluding the Meetup user, as indicated via their base group's URL, would be best to me. The reason to exclude their event(s) is because the Meetup organizer is not maintaining accuracy of their own listings. If they fix the data, they'd be welcome back in. As for Eventful, they're just blindly aggregating bunches Meetups. I certainly don't want to exclude ALL of the Meetup groups that Eventful may discover, because such discovery is a helpful thing. - Michael Hyde from email

[[[ I guess that excluding the Meetup user, as indicated via their base group's URL, would be best to me. ]]] On further investigation, that may be impractical. The URL to exclude, in that case, is inside a structure that isn't returned by default on a scan of Eventful. So it would be necessary to nearly double the API load on Eventful in order to dig out that info. - Jon Udell

So I think instead we should use, as the base of http://eventful.com/northbo..., simply http://eventful.com/northbo.... I'll go ahead and implement it that way. If you bookmark that as the base, with the tag exclude=yes, any event in the series should be excluded. - Jon Udell

Hmm. That's no good either, because the base defined that way is not guaranteed to be unique. And qualifying the URL with its title still won't produce that guarantee. Nor will the venue id which in your case just defaults to the zip code. This is tricky. I think I'll ask Brian Dear, creator of Eventful, for his advice. - Jon Udell

I think I get your points about what Eventful is returning. How about a different tact -- provide a means for a curator to exclude based on a text match of, say, the "elmcity listing text" -- i.e. the string in the default elmcity HTML consisting of title, source, and venue name. In my case, this would be " Tom's in Northborough Meetup (eventful: Postal code 01532, United States)". Yes,... more... - Michael Hyde

I think MySpace cals are a great starting point. I have 15 or so calendars I've identified (some less formatted than others) that might be a starting point: They are all bookmarked at delicious with the tag "broken" http://delicious.com/whyhunt... - Bill Rawlinson

This is great. Is there a tag we can all use to filter our bookmarks for you, ex "to-scrape"? Or is it the subset of our bookmarks that do not contain "ics"? - Kevin Curry

This WV3 servlet seems to be commonly used by colleges for their calendars. Of specific interest to me is this one: http://calendarevents.coastal.edu/wv3... but I see that other colleges such as U of Cincinnati seem to use the same one: http://calendar.uc.edu/ also Wellesley: https://calendar.wellesley.edu/wv3publ... - Dave Slusher

This is a great effort - thanks. i marked my elmcity broken fusecal calendars with "broken" too. the one I want the most is the city gov't calendar - http://www.fallschurchva.gov/EventCa.... rock on! - Dave Witzel

Bill: where (or all of them) recognisable by FuseCal? - Nikita Pchelin

Thanks for input guys, we'll be working on bringing them alive, and keep the community posted :) - Nikita Pchelin

I have no idea how widespread "Webevents" is - but here's an example http://www.usask.ca/cgi-bin... - Guy Kelsey

here's an example of a page from a content management system - Cold Fusion - many organizaitons - especially government orgs in Canada use CF calendars http://www.saskpork.com/html... - Guy Kelsey

here's an example of a Joomla - generated calendar page http://www.viewsaskatoon.ca/compone... - Guy Kelsey

Nikita - Most if not all were recognized by fusecal. I don't really remember anymore sorry. - Bill Rawlinson

ColdFusion is a language/framework for developing web apps so they will need to be pointed to the various calendars implemented in CF in order to parse them; they, undoubtedly, are each formatted in a proprietary way. Just a thought but pyQuery might be a good tool for the scraping engine especially since I know bits of elmcity are already in python. - Bill Rawlinson

I can confirm that a wv3 calendar is in use by our local university - and since they have basically stopped any progress on providing an ical feed... here is the calendar: http://r25webviewer.marshall.edu/wv3... : Oddly their software does have the capability to generate a vcalendar for a specific event - see:... more... - Bill Rawlinson

Regarding the log viewer: My goal is to publish all the info necessary to understand how the service in general, and your hub in particular, is working -- or maybe not working. There are a lot of things that "not working" could mean. Some are problems external to the elmcity service, e.g. an iCalendar URL that you bookmarked is temporarily unavailable, Eventful or Upcoming is... more... - Jon Udell

Looked at FAQ, but no hits searching for "viewing". Did an update go missing? - Michael Hyde

1. http://www.librarything.com/local... - Jon Udell

2. http://www.myspace.com/hobmyrt... - Jon Udell