ElmCity Calendar Aggregation Project

[Matt Gillooly]

Short version:

Building a master calendar for Providence, RI. What I need from you:
URLs to calendars which should be included.


Long version:

A few weeks ago, Jon Udell issued a call for calendar curators to join
his ElmCity project. The gist of it is simple: anyone can collect
iCal URLs for local events into a Delicious account, which his app
will periodically parse, aggregate, and republish in several data
formats and as an embeddable Javascript widget. (More info at
http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/03/11/calling-calendar-curators/ and
http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/)

I was reminded of this today by a request on the Seed Providence
UserVoice page for a master calendar for Providence events (see
http://seedprovidence.uservoice.com/pages/general/suggestions/149790-one-great-calendar),
and decided to get the ball rolling to get Providence involved in the
fun. I've contacted Jon and I'm starting to aggregate calendars into
http://delicious.com/mashablecity. It's only a matter of time now
before we've got an aggregated Providence calendar along the lines of
http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/services/elmcity/html

For this to work as well as possible, we're going to need a diverse
set of calendars to aggregate. This is where I need your help. If
you know of any Providence-centric calendars that should be included,
please post the URL here or email to ma...@mattgillooly.com with a
subject of "MashableCity Calendars". iCalendar URLs are ideal, but
regular web pages are great too.

Thanks in advance for your help. I look forward to further chipping
away at our city's data problems together.

cheers,
Matt

[Matt Gillooly]

The aggregated calendar is now up at http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/services/mashablecity/html

Let me know what else I can add!

cheers,
Matt

[Allan T.]

Matt, can you add the QuickWhatsUp calendar? Also, did you add the
ArtTix calendar already...

On Mar 31, 12:01 am, Matt Gillooly <matt.gillo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The aggregated calendar is now up athttp://elmcity.cloudapp.net/services/mashablecity/html

[Matt Gillooly]

Thanks for the leads on calendars, both on and off the forum. I've
added what I could, and should have time to add more over the
weekend... keep 'em coming!

I thought I'd write a bit about the aggregation process, so calendar
publishers know what they can do to streamline things.

When a calendar comes in, I look at it to make sure that it's not spam
and that it contains primarily events in and around Providence. As
long as the calendar is appropriate (so far, they all have been), I
look for an iCalendar feed of the events, and I bookmark that feed on
Delicious. Periodically, the elmcity software fetches the events from
those feeds and builds the aggregated calendar. You can keep track of
the bookmarked feeds at http://delicious.com/mashablecity/ics

By far, the best thing you can do as a calendar publisher who wished
to be included, is to publish an iCalendar feed on your site. This
makes my job almost trivial, and I will always process those requests
first. (If you wish to add an iCalendar feed to your site, I
recommend looking at Jon Udell's articles on the subject, which can be
found at http://delicious.com/judell/icalpub+howto)

The next best thing you can do is to send me the URL to the web page
that contains the events. Often times, FuseCal.com does a fine job of
extracting the events, and I can use the resulting iCalendar feed. I
did this for http://www.rihumanities.org/calendar, and the results
were nearly perfect (it missed 1 all-day event this month). This adds
an extra step and a minute or two to my process, and introduces some
risk of error, so I will process these calendars after getting through
all the calendars that provide their own iCalendar feed.

Lastly, some calendars do not harvest well at all when pushed through
FuseCal. Lacking any alternative access to the event data, the best I
can do with these is file a bug report to the FuseCal team.
Unfortunately, Allan, this was the case with QuickWhatsUp and
ArtTixRI.

Thanks again for your calendar suggestions. I'm excited to see this
collection of useful information come together, and I'm *really*
excited to see what kind of things we can build on top of it.

cheers,
Matt

[Matt Gillooly]

Update 4/8/09: Jon Udell has added an iCalendar feed to the
aggregation software, which you can access at
http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/services/mashablecity/ics