Perhaps we should be speaking about things moving “at the speed of the web”…. go away from a web based tool/service for a week or more, and you may have missed 3 new versions or 40 new features. No I am not complaining (I like the chaos), just observing from a floating raft in the river web.
A few barks back, I was trying to find a way to incorporate data form a Google calender into a wordpress powered site. Editing the calendar was slick in the Google Calendar interface, but sipping out content… well I tried some WordPress Plugins (mixed results, difficult to control output, or to get events in the right order); tried some AJAX code but later found this was yielding RSS telling me the calendar changes, not the date order– and lastly, using an iCal plugin.
This effort is for NMC’s Second Life Campus site — my grand goal is that as people start to plan classes, meetings, presentations here, we can get them to toss it on a gCalendar. Maybe too grand.
Well heck, I should have gone outside for a few days and shoveled some rock, since just waiting would yield what I found today – Google Calendar now has a tool to generate on an external web site– a Calendar like display. It’s perfect! Instead of wrestling with parsing of RSS/iCal content, I get a pretty wall calendar- see http://www.nmc.org/sl/calendar/. It sits inside an HTML iframe (need to look at that for layout/accessibility problems).
The only thing missing now are… some things on the calendar. Another project in the making. I also have a wiki going (not yet opened) where we are writing mor of our user documentation, and hoping to get some participating from those using the NMC Campus in the writing of it.
Sometimes in this fast paced world of technology it just pays to wait… but not too long.
If you want to keep this NMC-specific, read no more, but it would be nice to have a cal somewhere where educational events in SL are listed. Currently I receive these from a dozen sources & have to assemble them myself – and thus I miss some great events because I hear about them after the fact.
Better yet would be a aggregator that gathered these events automatically from other sites and assembled them into one master cal…..
Yes. that really is the holy grail of calendering. We’ve been searching for a solution to this issue for a long time. As soon as you get two websites and two groups things get complicated…
I agree with y’all both! Yee-hah!
Calendaring just has always been a PITA, and I have already done more than one of my own calendar database implementations, nothing worth bragging about.
There *seems* to be a widely used format (iCal) for event types; is it a matter of getting a more “standard” and applied XML format? That seems uphill.
So here is the free idea some Ruby on Rails pedal to the medal coder can take for free, code up a beta, and sell to YahooMicroGoogle for a few beans- a Web 2.0 calendar creation/sharing tool (lots of them) where calendar items are TAGGED, aggregated, re-fed etc. Rip-Mix-Feed for Calendars, where art thou?
We could be RICH, gents!