Events, Twitter and iCal
We recently redid the backend for out events here at AADL. While you probably haven't seen many changes on the public site, we now have the backbone that will allow us to create all kinds of cool things and improved events. Online registration, My Events, reminders. All kinds of things will be possible.
To test out the new system we made a few quick applications to take advantage of it. The first is a Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/aadl which gives announcements of events 30 minutes before they begin, among other things. Within a couple days there was already over a dozen followers. The twitter feed utilizes a PHP5 class that can be found at http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/files which was coupled with a few simple calls to our events API. With our class and the Twitter class it took very little time to get up an running. A cron takes care of the rest.
iCal
Another big feature is iCal feeds that can be subscribed to for out events. This is still under active development so you may experience some occasional issues. Feel free to comment if you have any suggestions or problems. Here are the URLs currently available. I'll update the list as I add them. Only the Exhibits feed shows exhibits until I can fix some of the all day events so they don't clutter up your calendar.
- All Events : http://api.aadl.org/ical/all
- Exhibits: http://api.aadl.org/ical/exhibits
- Downtown Events: http://api.aadl.org/ical/all/downtown
- Malletts Events: http://api.aadl.org/ical/all/malletts
- Pittsfield Events: http://api.aadl.org/ical/all/pittsfield
- West Events: http://api.aadl.org/ical/all/west
- Northeast Events: http://api.aadl.org/ical/all/northeast
To get events for a specific keyword you can do the following (replace keyword with your word of choice)
http://api.aadl.org/ical/search/keyword
Again, send any comments, suggestions or problems. Once the iCal becomes more stable you should see easy links on out website.
Comments
I've been messing with Yahoo Pipes lately. I created this pipe to combine multiple RSS feeds from AADL into one feed: http://pipes.yahoo.com/rjstone/aadlfeeds
Too bad I was unable to autogenerate list of all feeds on the site using Yahoo Pipes modules. The feed autodiscovery modules don't work, and I can't load the RSS feed index pages in order to try to attempt to parse them using their lame regexp implementation. Maybe one day they'll add a real HTML/XML parser module or something (thought I'm still not sure I could currently fetch the necessary pages due to robots.txt settings.)
People may find it useful to clone my pipe and delete uninteresting feeds from it.
I don't suppose there's an existing script or some taxonomy module keyword that could help in combining multiple feeds? Is there an OPML file?
More messing around:
These "visual" programming languages are annoying if you have to do anything that's even slightly more than trivial. I wish they'd just let me upload a limited ruby or python script into a sandbox.
Just as we have an RSS feed for user/checkouts under /myaccounts, could that same info (due date) be presented as an ical feed? (unfortunately there isn't a good way I've found to transform dates in RSS to iCal otherwise it would simply be an XSL stylesheet :-)