iCal degraded usefulness
Sean Dague
programatic accessing of meetup data.
I noticed the ical feeds seem to have degraded in their usefulness, as
the description field now has title, date, and link jammed in it, as
well as only about 200 characters of the actual description. While that
might be ok for outlook, it's very frustrating for parsing the ical for
syndication in other ways.
Any chance that there could be a full ical (with all the text in the
SUMMARY field) made available?
-Sean
--
Sean Dague Learn about the Universe with the
sean at dague dot net Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association
http://dague.net http://midhudsonastro.org
Doug Tangren
This may not be exactly the right forum, but it is related to the programatic accessing of meetup data.
I noticed the ical feeds seem to have degraded in their usefulness, as the description field now has title, date, and link jammed in it, as well as only about 200 characters of the actual description. While that might be ok for outlook, it's very frustrating for parsing the ical for syndication in other ways.
Any chance that there could be a full ical (with all the text in the SUMMARY field) made available?
Hi Sean,
When this this description change for you. It's we have been truncating the event description in the ical syndicated feeds for quite a while now.
If you need programmatic access to a list of your groups Meetup events you many find one of the REST API's easier to work with as they provide structured responses.
The two that would be most helpful would be
/2/events - http://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/docs/2/events/#response
/2/open_events - http://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/docs/2/open_events/#response
The main difference between to the two is that 2/events is targeted at groups you may belong to and 2/open_events is targeted at finding public events
-Sean
--
Sean Dague Learn about the Universe with the
sean at dague dot net Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association
http://dague.net http://midhudsonastro.org
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Sean Dague
> Hi Sean,
>
> When this this description change for you. It's we have been truncating
> the event description in the ical syndicated feeds for quite a while now.
>
> If you need programmatic access to a list of your groups Meetup events
> you many find one of the REST API's easier to work with as they provide
> structured responses.
>
> The two that would be most helpful would be
>
> /2/events - http://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/docs/2/events/#response
> /2/open_events -
> http://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/docs/2/open_events/#response
>
> The main difference between to the two is that 2/events is targeted at
> groups you may belong to and 2/open_events is targeted at finding public
> events
Honestly, I don't really remember when this was last working, it was
about 18 months ago that I first set this up, and I thought I was
getting full ical then. The API doesn't do me any good here, because the
point is an aggregating calendar that is pulling from a number of
different ical sources (not just meetup), and building a consolidated view.
Beyond the truncation being annoying, because it really strips out a lot
of the useful info, it's also bad form that the title, date, and link
are all being jammed into SUMMARY, as those already exist in the other
ical fields, and makes syndicating the meetup stuff just look sloppy, as
it all gets duplicated.
I was encouraging groups who didn't have other infrastructure over to
meetup, but now that the ical is all messed up, I'll encourage them to
setup google calendars instead.
If there is a way to get the message to the dev team that having an
actual full ical feed with a clean SUMMARY, that would be great. It
should really only be a small amount of work.
Sean Dague
> If there is a way to get the message to the dev team that having an
> actual full ical feed with a clean SUMMARY, that would be great. It
> should really only be a small amount of work.
Sorry, my terminology was wrong. It's DESCRIPTION that's getting
overloaded with the other fields (SUMMARY, DTSTART, and URL).
Nathan Hamblen
> On 02/27/2012 01:47 PM, Sean Dague wrote:
>> If there is a way to get the message to the dev team that having an
>> actual full ical feed with a clean SUMMARY, that would be great. It
>> should really only be a small amount of work.
>
> Sorry, my terminology was wrong. It's DESCRIPTION that's getting
> overloaded with the other fields (SUMMARY, DTSTART, and URL).
Hi Sean, thanks for the feedback. These feeds have collected some cruft
over time, and they've been stripped down to support clients that don't
process every iCalendar field.
We've been planning to rethink and rebuild them as API services, to
provide richer feeds for clients that do support it. Since you're
waiting on this we'll try to make it happen sooner.
Is there anything else you'd like to see related to these? We've heard
from some members that a feed for the meetups you haven't RSVP'd to
would be helpful, to complement the "going" feed. Then you could have
both "going" and "undecided" on your calendar, but not the meetups that
you already RSVP'd "no" to.
Nathan Hamblen
Meetup API Lead
http://meetup.com/api
Sean Dague
> Hi Sean, thanks for the feedback. These feeds have collected some cruft
> over time, and they've been stripped down to support clients that don't
> process every iCalendar field.
>
> We've been planning to rethink and rebuild them as API services, to
> provide richer feeds for clients that do support it. Since you're
> waiting on this we'll try to make it happen sooner.
>
> Is there anything else you'd like to see related to these? We've heard
> from some members that a feed for the meetups you haven't RSVP'd to
> would be helpful, to complement the "going" feed. Then you could have
> both "going" and "undecided" on your calendar, but not the meetups that
> you already RSVP'd "no" to.
For my purposes, I just need a feed for a meetup group (one feed only),
which has as much of the detail as possible in it, and a clean
DESCRIPTION field. That's letting me assemble a calendar like this -
http://mhvlug.org/hvstemcal out of local technology events (some from
meetup ical, others in other ical sources).
This is what things look like when I pull in a full ical:
http://mhvlug.org/stem-events/2012/02/the-mystery-of-beta-lyrae
This is what they look like with the meetup ical:
http://mhvlug.org/stem-events/2012/02/favorite-projects
(yes, there are a lot of other ways those could be made better, but for
now lets just focus on what the truncation and duplication causes.)
I can see personal ical also being useful, but I'm really asking about
generic for the group so it's accessible to people who aren't regular
meetup users easily.
The only other thing that bit us recently is confusion over the fact
that because meetup doesn't ask for an end time, all ical events are 2
hours. While that's often a good guess for a weeknight event, it
actually just adds to confusion when that timeblock is shown to people
on their phones, google calendar, or other calendar syndication. I
realize this a *much* bigger change, but with the prevalence of smart
phones and google calendar syncing to them, addressing real end times
would be great as a long term goal.
Thanks again for your quick responses here.
Nathan Hamblen
works much better for what you're doing, within a few weeks.
About end times, you're in luck! There is work in progress for meetups
to have an optional end time. This will inform the the calendar feeds
very soon (or immediately) after it becomes available.
Nathan Hamblen
Meetup API Lead
http://meetup.com/api
Sean Dague
-Sean
Doug Tangren
Nice, awesome. Can't wait to see that.
Sean Dague
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 2:46 PM, Sean Dague <se...@dague.net
> <mailto:se...@dague.net>> wrote:
>
> Nice, awesome. Can't wait to see that.
>
>
> A new ical emitting endpoint for group calendar events should now be
> available.
>
> public group calendars should be accessible via the api with
>
> http://api.meetup.com/:urlname/upcoming.ical
>
> and calendars with private calendars may be accessible by supplying an
> api key argument
>
> http://api.meetup.com/:urlname/upcoming.ical?key=API_KEY
>
> Please give us your feed back.
>
> More info on feeds are available at http://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/feeds
Can you add back the LOCATION and URL fields (as fields, not in the
body). Those are in the personal ical, but not in the group ical, and
they are really useful to have.
It was good to remove them from DESCRIPTION, but now they are missing
entirely. The URL is the most problematic loss.
-Sean
--
Sean Dague Mid-Hudson Valley
se...@dague.net Linux Users Group
http://dague.net http://mhvlug.org
Doug Tangren
Finally was able to check this out. Looks better, however...
Can you add back the LOCATION and URL fields (as fields, not in the body). Those are in the personal ical, but not in the group ical, and they are really useful to have.
It was good to remove them from DESCRIPTION, but now they are missing entirely. The URL is the most problematic loss.