In yet another feat of “faux syndication”, we now have our events database updating our Ocotillo Central and Action Group blog sites automatically. This provides a dynamic link from the info on the main Ocotillo Events calendar which has unique URLs for the following views:
- All Action Group Events
- General Ocotillo Events
- Learning Objects Action Group Events
- Hybrid Courses Action Group Events
- ePortfolio Action Group Events
- Emerging Learning Technology Action Group Events
This information is now pushed to Ocotillo Central with the three next Ocotillo events appearing in the top right box where John posts his updates, and in an appropriate section in the listings for each Action Group. In addition, each group’s events are now dynamically inserted to the left side bar of each group’s blog.
Once we can modify our calendar database authoring scripts, the co-chairs will be able to directly add/edit events to the database.
I call it “faux” since what I am doing is running a script every 15 minutes which hits our database, and builds a file with the data for each information area. Since the blog pages are *.php, I can simply fill the content to the blog pages using php include statements. It makes more sense (to moi) than dynamically hitting a database every time a page is requested. This is more or less how the updates from the wikis (taking the RSS URL and running it through Magpie RSS parser) and the discussion boards (using a phpBB mod Fetch_ALl) are fed to the sites.
I guess like the other faux feeds, I can make our calendar update scripts write the events as an RSS format as well. Tiny task.
