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RSS And Calendar Integration
sytelus writes "Many has played with the idea of packaging calendar information in to the RSS feed. Almost every other website owned by some kind of group or organization has an event calendar so the thought of aggregating those events in to your calendar is pretty appealing. Even more appealing is the thought that people might start tagging their weekend plans and schedules in their RSS feeds. This essay , written after digging through dozens of W3C specs and half a dozen of implementations, reviews the current state of affair."
... it's called iCal, and it's already here.
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
Works for me.... Does everything *have* to be XML??!??
what's wrong with iCal, aka vcal 2.0? There's even an XML version, and it can definitely be syndicated better than RSS.
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Even more appealing is the thought that people might start tagging their weekend plans and schedules in their RSS feeds.
And why would that be?
What would that be good for?
And besides that, even if most sites offer RSS feeds today, how many people are really reading them?
Maybe it sounds stupid to mention that on slashdot, but I know a lot of people, who don't even have the slightest clue what RSS is in the first place.
Many has [sic] played with the idea of driving screws with a hammer. Almost every other woodworking project undertaken by some kind of group or organization involves the use of hammers, so the thought of using the same technology to drive screws is pretty appealing. Even more appealing is the thought that people might start using hammers for bolts, wingnuts, and gas tank caps. This essay, written after digging through dozens of tool catalogs and striking my head with half a dozen sledgehammer implementations, reviews the current state of affair [sic].
why are they intrested in rss ?
because they want to subscribe to events...
people create a ical file and stick it on webDAV that way you can tell if it has changed with a http method
and yes you can use RDF but then half the readers (rss reader / ical from outlook) dont know about that and wont anytime soon (while all os's apple and MS can read webDAV )
really what they need is a good ical client and hopefully thunderbird / sunbird can do this and accept meetings / book resources whatever...
regards
John Jones
It just sounds like another "project" that will be adopted by a computer science student, and duly abandoned after (s)he finishes final year and begins paid employment.
If you really want to contribute, get involved in the calendar (iCal) working group in the IETF, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. At least then, when you stop having enough time to contribute, your effort and work won't be lost or just gather dust before becoming another abandoned project.
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...but I agree that there's a need for more. For example, hCalendar has some merit being XHTML compatible and can be nicely embedded in any XHTML (or even HTML) page. Distribution of calendar files (.ics) isn't the problem. The real problem is that it's hard to discuss events outside .ics format so that applications are still able to automatically extract the information. hCalendar is nicely submerged inside the real content as demonstrated by the example. Throw in hCard and we can finally talk about usable metadata embedded in a web page.
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"Maybe it sounds stupid to mention that on slashdot, but I know a lot of people, who don't even have the slightest clue what RSS is in the first place."
Running Firefox? Look in the lower right-hand corner. See that orange icon? Now what browser do we all know that's coming along like gangbusters? Uh, huh. Now people may not know what RSS is, just by you and me jawing about it on a geek site. But they will see that icon in the corner, and ask "what's this"? They then go to either Firefox's trusty "Help" menu and look up Live Bookmarks, or they ask a geeky friend. See people know and use things, because the Mozilla team decided to actually put the feature in a usable form for people to use, instead of just talking about it.
You're going to see something similiar happening with all the other technologies we discuss here.
Put it in front of them, and they'll use it. Talk about it, and only geeks will.
What I'd like to do is introduce a distributed events system, so that information on an event could be submitted at one site and it could propagate around the network keeping all the listings up to date.
Requirements for the system are simplicity. i.e. setting up a node should be very easy (most groups are not very computer literate) so recommendations for easy to install software would be good. The software would need to integrate easily with existing websites, so nice configurable php scripts would be good. Maybe a bit richer format than iCal so its easy to search for events in England or a particular county and also some tagging features to allow for certain types of events.
I'd also like to do something similar for links to websites.
Any suggestions?
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
You offer no help to answer the submitter's question, and instead post a snide comment with a lame Googling attempt. At least you apologized.
Not everything can be solved with a simple Google search.
The irony with your shoot-from-the-hip post is that out of the top 20 Google results in your search, there is only one useful link (The IETF RFC site).
The rest of the results deal with closed-source software products such as Apple's iCal or Brown Bear's iCal client, an iCal sharing service, or point to completely obsolete websites (Last post was from 2003 or 2002, for example).
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
FYI - I set up RSS Calendars a few weeks ago for SF Station http://www.sfstation.com/ -- a bit burried, if you drill down into Clubs, Music, City, or any of the Arts, you can get a listing of SF Station editorially picked events as RSS.