Embedding options for list of events (meetings) on town websites

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Peter DeGregorio

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Mar 2, 2016, 4:30:07 PM3/2/16
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Hello,

I have looked into using Google Calendar for listing events/meetings for both the town and individual boards on the main town website. The experience has been disappointing because Google takes so long to pull the calendar changes. This appears to be a known problem that Google has for years not done anything about. The effect is it took maybe 12 hours for a board-specific calendar to be refreshed by Google and almost 24 hours for the town calendar to be refreshed. This appears to led at least one town to show a disclaimer near the calendar: "Please note that the official meeting postings are at www.mytowngovernment.org. Latest changes may not be reflected on the website."

So the reasons for using a Google Calendar in the first place is it is compact and shows popup details. A better alternative would be to refer to mytowngovernment.org directly in an IFRAME, a web page construct which permits content from another website to be displayed.

(I realized none of the foregoing is new information ... I'm just framing the question / request)

The content options for using an IFRAME with mytowngovernment.org for a list of events/meetings appear to be limited to the full calendar, which requires a large space and is a grid 7 days wide by several weeks long, or showing the board page which contains a lot of excess info. The silent kiosk option takes too long to scroll back to the initial list of events. If there are other options I don't know them ... is there a list?

What would work well is a list of events/meetings such as

02/29/16   7:00PM    Broadband Advisory Committee
03/01/16   7:00AM
    Election
03/02/16   6:30PM    Assessors CANCELLED
03/04/16   7:00PM    Board of Selectmen
03/08/16   7:00PM    Broadband Advisory Committee

with some URL parameters possibly to control the data selection and output. For data selection the town id (zip code), optional board id, relative start date (0=today 7=week ago), how many events to display (default all), how many days to display (default 7). For output control open links in new tab/window (default yes), maybe some style controls, option to show location. Link on date/time would open the specific meeting. Link on board name would open the board's page.

Something this would facilitate is putting the lists of upcoming events on the town's home page which often has limited available space and also would facilitate use of mobile devices which don't deal with wide data very well.

Having something like this could mean getting Google Calendar out of the picture. So when we have to cancel a meeting due to weather (as happened 2/8/16) the website reflects the fact immediately not up to 24 hours later.

Joshua Smith

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Mar 2, 2016, 4:43:33 PM3/2/16
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I could do something like that. I’d recommend that there just be the link to the meeting, since it’s easy enough to get to the board once you are at the meeting notice.

Another option you should look at are wordpress plugins that just read the ICS file directly. There’s no reason you need Google Calendar in the middle of that transaction.

A quick search turns up hundreds of wordpress calendar widgets. I’m sure many of them have an ICS feed option.

Let me know if you strike out on that, and I’ll look at adding what you are asking for.

-Joshua

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Peter DeGregorio

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Mar 3, 2016, 9:26:34 AM3/3/16
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There are indeed hundreds of WordPress calendar plugins and one I found, amr ical events lists, appears to meet my requirements that it accept ICS feeds, be currently maintained, popular and free. A feature of these calendars, unfortunately, for my purposes, is infrequent ICS downloads, like once a day. This may be because sites hosting ICS object to be repeatedly queried and will cut off offenders. Of course, open meeting law itself means events are posted days in advance so immediate updates are not critical. My concern was a committee chair schedules a meeting then checks the town website to see if it's there and it won't be. But that's probably a training issue. And putting in a disclaimer is less of a problem now that I understand this stuff better. It is unlikely that the town's main website calendar will be wrong.

Regarding a possible feature add in mytowngovernment.org, I agree that a link to the board is not needed. Also, maybe the agenda could go into the link's hover text (title). But I'm happy to go the plugin route. We'll probably use mytowngovernment.org full calendar in an IFRAME on a separate calendar page and that will be up to date. 

Error messages are being displayed when I used the ICS feed from mytowngovernment.org

Message displayed to logged in admin only:
Unable to create DateTime object from 2016-03-01 TC:20:23 
DateTime::__construct(): Failed to parse time string (2016-03-01 TC:20:23) at position 11 (T): The timezone could not be found in the database
This appears to refer to "CREATED:20160301UTC2023000" in the feed ... it doesn't like the time entry starting with UTC. I have noticed that entries created by the automatic scheduler are not being reported as being invalid. So maybe "CREATED:20160301UTC2023000" should be "CREATED:20160301T2023000Z"

Example:

curl "http://www.mytowngovernment.org/01085/calendar.ics"
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//mytowngovernment.org
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME:Montgomery\, MA Open Meetings
X-WR-CALDESC:Montgomery\, MA publishes their Open Meeting announcements at http://www.mytowngovernment.org/01085. This calendar summarizes those postings.
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20160308T000000Z
DTEND:20160308T000000Z
DTSTAMP:20160308T000000Z
UID:ahNzfnRvd25nb3Zlcm5tZW50LWhychkL...@mytowngovernment.org
CREATED:20160301UTC2023000
DESCRIPTION:Montgomery\, MA Broadband Advisory Committee\nhttp://www.mytowngovernment.org/meeting/5850387764477952\nTo be determined\n
LAST-MODIFIED:20160301UTC2032000
LOCATION:Town Hall\, 161 Main Rd\, Montgomery\, MA 01085-9525
SUMMARY:Broadband Advisory Committee
SEQUENCE:1
STATUS:CONFIRMED
TRANSP:OPAQUE
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20160314T230000Z
DTEND:20160314T230000Z
DTSTAMP:20160314T230000Z
UID:ahNzfnRvd25nb3Zlcm5tZW50LWhychoLEg1TY2hlZ...@mytowngovernment.org
CREATED:20000101T000000Z
DESCRIPTION:Montgomery\, MA Broadband Advisory Committee\n(regular meeting\, not yet scheduled)\n
LAST-MODIFIED:20000101T000000Z
LOCATION:Town Hall\, 161 Main Rd\, Montgomery\, MA 01085-9525
SUMMARY:Broadband Advisory Committee
SEQUENCE:1
STATUS:CONFIRMED
TRANSP:OPAQUE
END:VEVENT

Joshua Smith

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Mar 3, 2016, 9:36:26 AM3/3/16
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Yup, that was a bug in the ICS code. I guess Google just ignored it.

Fixed.

Peter DeGregorio

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Mar 3, 2016, 5:09:13 PM3/3/16
to MyTownGovernment Users Forum
Thank you ... it looks like I should have reported
LAST-MODIFIED:20160301UTC2032000
as well.
Other than that I don't see any other UTCs in the ICS feed.


On Thursday, March 3, 2016 at 9:36:26 AM UTC-5, Joshua Smith wrote:
Yup, that was a bug in the ICS code. I guess Google just ignored it.

Fixed.

On Mar 3, 2016, at 9:26 AM, Peter DeGregorio <peter.de...@gmail.com> wrote:

There are indeed hundreds of WordPress calendar plugins and one I found, amr ical events lists, appears to meet my requirements that it accept ICS feeds, be currently maintained, popular and free. A feature of these calendars, unfortunately, for my purposes, is infrequent ICS downloads, like once a day. This may be because sites hosting ICS object to be repeatedly queried and will cut off offenders. Of course, open meeting law itself means events are posted days in advance so immediate updates are not critical. My concern was a committee chair schedules a meeting then checks the town website to see if it's there and it won't be. But that's probably a training issue. And putting in a disclaimer is less of a problem now that I understand this stuff better. It is unlikely that the town's main website calendar will be wrong.

Regarding a possible feature add in mytowngovernment.org, I agree that a link to the board is not needed. Also, maybe the agenda could go into the link's hover text (title). But I'm happy to go the plugin route. We'll probably use mytowngovernment.org full calendar in an IFRAME on a separate calendar page and that will be up to date. 

Error messages are being displayed when I used the ICS feed from mytowngovernment.org

Message displayed to logged in admin only:
Unable to create DateTime object from 2016-03-01 TC:20:23 
DateTime::__construct(): Failed to parse time string (2016-03-01 TC:20:23) at position 11 (T): The timezone could not be found in the database
This appears to refer to "CREATED:20160301UTC2023000" in the feed ... it doesn't like the time entry starting with UTC. I have noticed that entries created by the automatic scheduler are not being reported as being invalid. So maybe "CREATED:20160301UTC2023000" should be "CREATED:20160301T2023000Z"

Example:

curl "http://www.mytowngovernment.org/01085/calendar.ics"
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//mytowngovernment.org
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME:Montgomery\, MA Open Meetings
X-WR-CALDESC:Montgomery\, MA publishes their Open Meeting announcements at http://www.mytowngovernment.org/01085. This calendar summarizes those postings.
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20160308T000000Z
DTEND:20160308T000000Z
DTSTAMP:20160308T000000Z

CREATED:20160301UTC2023000
DESCRIPTION:Montgomery\, MA Broadband Advisory Committee\nhttp://www.mytowngovernment.org/meeting/5850387764477952\nTo be determined\n
LAST-MODIFIED:20160301UTC2032000
LOCATION:Town Hall\, 161 Main Rd\, Montgomery\, MA 01085-9525
SUMMARY:Broadband Advisory Committee
SEQUENCE:1
STATUS:CONFIRMED
TRANSP:OPAQUE
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20160314T230000Z
DTEND:20160314T230000Z
DTSTAMP:20160314T230000Z

CREATED:20000101T000000Z
DESCRIPTION:Montgomery\, MA Broadband Advisory Committee\n(regular meeting\, not yet scheduled)\n
LAST-MODIFIED:20000101T000000Z
LOCATION:Town Hall\, 161 Main Rd\, Montgomery\, MA 01085-9525
SUMMARY:Broadband Advisory Committee
SEQUENCE:1
STATUS:CONFIRMED
TRANSP:OPAQUE
END:VEVENT


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Joshua Smith

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Mar 4, 2016, 8:43:43 AM3/4/16
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Fixed.

Peter DeGregorio

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Mar 6, 2016, 1:24:51 PM3/6/16
to MyTownGovernment Users Forum
Additional info on the free WordPress plugin "amr ical events lists". The plugin has the option of showing a refresh button (looks like a green recycling symbol). When the button is clicked the ICS file is downloaded again from mytowngovernment. We plan to use that for making sure our main website which has calendar and events lists fed from mytowngovernment.org are up to date. In the screenshot below the refresh button was used bring in the latest update. Otherwise the feed is refreshed every 24 hours. This plugin with its on-demand refresh ability is going to make our integration of mytowngovernment.org info into our main website work well.

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