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elmcity
Status updates and discussion of calendar curation at http://elmcity.cloudapp.net.
I'm now recruiting curators for neighborhoods, towns, small cities, universities, etc.
To curate a location, select a delicious account for the purpose, copy the approach illustrated by http://delicious.com/elmcity, ping me here (or at jonu@microsoft.com) about it.
What's the status of the Upcoming feed at present? As of Sat 7-Nov it seems like no events are getting through.
Why are these Technorati posts showing up here?
Dunno. They come via a Yahoo Pipe which searches multiple services for elmcity. Not sure why it's triggering these spurious hits, disconnecting Technorati for now.
- Jon Udell
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
Is http://elmcity.cloudapp.net down or did it move? I'm not able to connect.
Me neither. Investigating...
- Jon Udell
Back now. Really sorry about that. Not an Azure thing generally, just elmcity. There was some reshuffling on the back end, I don't have the whole story yet but it appears that as a very early adopter my instance was hosted in a way that needed to change as Azure -- which is still a preview -- approaches production status.
- Jon Udell
Dear curators, the team over in elmcity-development is happy to announce that we have added some new functionality to our project; therefore, we would like to show off (: and ask for your feedback. Please look at this post to learn about new things we can do: http://nikitapchelin.wordpress.com/2009...
If possible, we'd like to keep discussion either here or in elmcity-development, and not in the blog comments, since it makes things to be more trackable (hey, I invented a word!). Thanks.
- Nikita Pchelin
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
Jon, is it possible to view a events from a subset of the feeds once elmcity has aggregated over them? The use case I'm wondering about is the ability to filter out Eventful listings for Toronto in a non-permanent way.
From a curator and user perspective I've been meaning to put in a source toggle that could just hide stuff along various axes. Since the default HTML view is loading jQuery anyway, that'll be worth doing if performance is OK.
- Jon Udell
However I'm guessing you may be wanting to view just the iCalendar stuff from a developer perspective? If so, there are intermediate outputs available, for example: http://elmcity.blob.core.windows.net/elmcity..., and also elmcity_upcoming.ics and elmcity_eventful.ics. Your ical version of that, i.e. torontocals/torontocals_ical.ics, doesn't exist because there are...
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- Jon Udell
BTW I was until recently also storing the intermediate outputs for iCalendar, Eventful, and Upcoming in correspondingly-named .xml files. Can resurrect that capability if needed.
- Jon Udell
Jon, I've got a new issue for you. There is a Falls Church City event on eventful listed as "daily" when it is really weekly (the "concerts in the park"). I'm getting requests to "unsubscribe". Can we make including eventful an option?
Yes, including Eventful could be optional. But there is a less draconian measure. We can exclude only certain Eventful users whose contributions prove to be unreliable. If you point me to the event, I'll see if that solution is possible in this case.
- 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...
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- 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...
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- 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?...
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- 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...
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- 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...
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- 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,...
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- Michael Hyde
[[[ place said text in either the title or notes field ]]] That's a /great/ idea! I'll look into it.The hard part will be how to explain this scenario clearly, because it closely resembles the case where the URL of the event to be excluded does refer to an event that Eventful defines in terms of recurrence, and that can therefore be excluded without this extra clue. But distinguishing...
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- Jon Udell
Hey everyone, the team over in elmcity-development would like to solicit any feature requests you have for our site (http://elmcity.cs.toronto.edu). Are there any sites you'd like to have automatically scraped and turned into ics files?
Thanks for asking, Jory. I would add: We want to prioritize services that are used widely, in many communities, so that effort invested in HTML-to-ICS translation wouldn't be a one-off, but instead would pay big dividends. Jory's part of a team of students from Univ of Toronto and Michigan state. They signed up to contribute to elmcity, and we decided that they'd try to replace some of...
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- Jon Udell
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:...
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- Bill Rawlinson
"Oddly their software does have the capability to generate a vcalendar for a specific event" That is odd. vCalendar is of course iCalendar's predecessor and close cousin. Using it in this case would mean making a whole bunch of requests -- two per event listed on the main page -- so it's probably not worth doing. But, still worth noting that the possibility exists.
- Jon Udell
New features for curators: Log viewing and metadata viewing
Details in the FAQ: http://blog.jonudell.net/elmcity...
- Jon Udell
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...
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- Jon Udell
Looked at FAQ, but no hits searching for "viewing". Did an update go missing?
- Michael Hyde
Oh, sorry, I put that into the status page not the FAQ: http://blog.jonudell.net/elmcity....
- Jon Udell
A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database - http://blog.jonudell.net/2009...
To: elmcity, From: @curator, Message: start « Jon Udell - http://blog.jonudell.net/2009...
This is the mechanism we've discussed. To use it, add the tag twitter=YourTwitterHandle to your metadata URL. When the service notices that, its Twitter account -- which is @elmcity_azure -- will follow yours. Then you can send a message. So far there's just one to send: "start". It means: "please reaggregate my hub ASAP". Fun!
- Jon Udell
For Jon Udell: Here's an event in Keene this Saturday, apparently associate with the Brides of Dracula showing: http://srbissette.com/?p=6412 Comic Boom hosting a signing of people associated with The Vermont Monster Guide
Thanks Dave. I popped it onto a calendar I keep around for miscellaneous stuff that falls through the cracks. Of course, almost /everything/ is miscellaneous stuff that falls through the cracks. So until/unless I can find a way to make this pub/sub model more evident to people, those cracks are canyons.
- Jon Udell
Book Events in the Myrtle Beach SC area - http://elmcity.cs.toronto.edu/site_me...
That's one way to do it. However I want insulate curators from the likely volatility of that service, which is for now a class project. I was going to wait a little longer, to resolve some outstanding issues, but since you've already found and bookmarked Myrtle Beach's LibraryThing events, here are two patterns now available:
- Jon Udell
Under the covers you get redirected to the service that the students are building. But if you use these patterns, you'll be isolated from the likely rehosting of that service. A couple of new metadata conventions apply. First, these bookmarks should be tagged trusted+indirect+feed instead of trusted+ics+feed. Second, you can add filter=StringToMatch to restrict the feed to events...
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- Jon Udell
School Committee Meetings - Town of Westborough MA [by Westborough.com] - http://www.google.com/calenda...
Jatoba - http://myspace.com/jatobamusic
The Starving Artist (Starving Artist) | MySpace - myspace.com ... - http://www.myspace.com/starvin...
lonesome lake on MySpace Music - Free Streaming MP3s, Pictures & Music ... - http://www.myspace.com/lonesom...
Grand Strand Bloggers - http://www.grandstrandbloggers.org/
Event start times are 4 hrs different between Upcoming and default HTML. http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event... shows a 1PM start, http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/service... lists a 5PM start for that event. Could Upcoming's API or the timezone logic in elmcity have changed recently, only affecting newly added items? Older "long-standing" events in Upcoming don't have this discrepancy.
"Could Upcoming's API or the timezone logic in elmcity have changed recently, only affecting newly added items?" That is a very perceptive question. If elmcity's timezone logic changed it /should/ equally affect all Upcoming entries processed by the aggregator. Which suggests checking Upcoming first. Thanks!
- Jon Udell
Update: I believe I was in fact incorrect about some events not being affected. I think that maybe _all_ Upcoming events are mis-printed; perhaps Elmcity timezone processing needs looking at. Data returned from Yahoo Upcoming API looks correct, as verified with a GET. E.g. a 7:30 PM Prescott AZ event shows up in the html view as on the following day at 1:30 AM. See view source of:...
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- Michael Hyde
[[[ perhaps Elmcity timezone processing needs looking at ]]] ... Again. Yup. Thanks!
- Jon Udell
Resolved. Thanks! BTW the Prescott case turned up an unrelated problem. Arizona does not observe daylight savings, and has its own timezone! So Prescott is still off by 1 hour. I've asked Susan Gerhart, the curator, to switch from tz=mountain to tz=arizona, which will fix that.
- Jon Udell
Blacklisting vs whitelisting
It's great that Michael and Bill have raised the issue of excluding things from eventful and upcoming. I've been thinking about this for a long time, I implemented a version of it in a prior incarnation of the service, and I have been looking forward to bringing that back. But I was reminded when looking at my own blog page, which now includes "upcoming music in keene" via http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/service..., that blacklisting and whitelisting are complementary. With the combination of RSS (or other output formats) and tags, we can control what events people see using inclusion too. It's another tool in the box.
- Jon Udell
Lionel Melka in Montreal - http://www.myspace.com/lionelm...
Is elmcity down, or is it my work squid proxy that isn't loading it? The page is not loading and the javascript widget is empty for me.
Allman Brothers: Nashville or Huntington? A parable about provenance and syndication - http://blog.jonudell.net/2009...
(testing to see if/when the irc bot sees this update)
- Jon Udell
Paris est belle! - http://www.librarything.com/local...
Horry County Library System events at the Bucksport branch - http://www.google.com/calenda...
Horry County Library System events at the Surfside branch - http://www.google.com/calenda...
Horry County Library System events at the Socastee branch - http://www.google.com/calenda...
Horry County Library System events at the Aynor branch - http://www.google.com/calenda...
Horry County Library System events at the North Myrtle Beach branch - http://www.google.com/calenda...
Horry County Library System events at the Conway branch - http://www.google.com/calenda...
Horry County Library System events at the Little River branch - http://www.google.com/calenda...
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