First up: we have a new design! You can see it in its full green glory at the usual place, calagator.org.

Our two meetups last week accomplished a lot. Some little things, some bigger (like the design). We’re continuing to struggle with our iCalendar & hCalendar tools, mofo and vPim. Mofo had a bug that was preventing postal codes from being read accurately. We now have a one-line patch that fixes this. A note to other open source developers: make it easy for people to find out about known bugs and send you patches when we encounter one! It’s very frustrating to lose half a day of work to something like this. We want to keep the ‘many eyes’ principle working.

All event pages now have a “Add to Google Calendar” link in the right sidebar, in addition to the previous iCal download link. This way you can send individual events to your personal calendar. There’s still also several ways to consume the entire events feed from the main events page.

We did more work on our duplicate event and venue management pages. You can get a sneak peek: events page & venues page. Help us out by spending a few minutes gardening duplicate entries.

You can see the full list of squashed bugs and other work on our wiki: http://code.google.com/p/calagator/wiki/StatusReports
Keep reporting any bugs you find to the issue tracker: http://code.google.com/p/calagator/issues/list

Update: One thing I left off—we started re-importing sources that have been flagged to request that. You can tell us to do this for your group’s calendar by checking the “re-import” box when you submit the url at http://calagator.org/sources/new.

We’re going to meet twice this week. Wednesday we’ll do another mini-sprint at Backspace (downtown on NW 5th), starting at noon. Come have lunch and work on bugs. Then on Saturday, we’ll meet at CubeSpace for our regularly scheduled code sprint at 10AM. We need to get the duplicate-entry management tools polished and ready for public use, and start importing and updating events on a recurring basis so users spend less time manually importing everything.

As a reminder, our meetings are open to everyone. Programmers (at any level of Ruby experience) and web designers are especially needed, but anyone can test the site, write documentation, and work on figuring out what’s left to do so we’re importing all calendar events for groups in the Portland tech community.

We’re using hCalendar (or hCal) for importing events. If you would like to share your events with calagator.org right away, here’s an example, followed by a short explanation of the markup needed.

<div class="vevent">
   <a class="url" href="http://calagator.wordpress.com">http://calagator.wordpress.com</a>
   <abbr class="dtstart" title="20080216T10:00">February 16, 2008, 10am</abbr>-
   <abbr class="dtend" title="20080216T18:00">6pm</abbr>
   <span class="summary">Calagator Codesprint</span> -  at
   <span class="location">Cubespace</span>, 622 SE Grand Ave. Portland, OR 97214
   <div class="geo">:
      <span class="latitude">45.51845</span>
      <span class="longitude">-122.66056</span>For more information, check with:
      <span class="contact">Audrey Eschright</span>
   </div><!-- end geo -->

Tags:
   <span class="category">calendaring</span>
   <span class="category">aggregation</span>
   <span class="category">alligators </span>

   <div class="description">
The Calagator Development Team is meeting every 2 weeks to create a calendar aggregator for local technical events. We're working with Ruby On Rails, writing documentation, gathering information about standards, and trying to increase the use of calendar standards like hCalendar.
    </div>
</div><!-- end vevent -->

Today, Calagator recognizes the following classes:

• vevent
  • dtstart (without timezone information)
  • summary
  • url

The import routine also recognizes multiple events on a single page.

Venues can be added through the web interface. The hackers will be working on recognition of the ‘location’ class soon.

*******

To make a valid hCal markup, you need to define three classes at a minimun:

• vevent
  • summary
  • dtstart

These classes can be added to any HTML tag and do not need to be styled. Once you’ve added these basic tags, Calagator will recognize the event.

Other tags you might consider using include:

• location
• geo (use http://www.batchgeocode.com/lookup/ to find lat and long for an address)
  • latitude
  • longitude
• dtend
• url
• contact
• category (may occur more than once)

Once you’ve done that, you can test our import at http://calagator.org/sources. If there’s a bug, click the Bugs link in the upper right hand corner and let us know what went wrong.

If you’d like to test your hCal before submitting to the Calagator, there is a Firefox plugin called Operator. Operator detects many different microformats in a webpage.

If you’re interested in learning more about what hCal has to offer, have a look at the microformats.org hcalendar explanation. There’s also a cheatsheet, and a list of hCalendar implementations.

From Audrey:

Today several of us met during the Code Sprint gathering at CubeSpace to talk and work on the calendar.

Participants: Audrey Eschright, Selena Deckelmann, Igal Koshevoy, Reid Biels, Paige Saez, Daniel Etra, Anselm Hook, and Bill Burcham.

We spent the first part of our gathering discussing our goals for the project. We focused on our reasons for creating a new calendar system, and the user communities we intend for this to serve. We determined that many existing calendar services have barriers to entry such as required registration that limit usage in our community. Current calendars can also lack the quality of details we would like to provide. We felt that creating a model for aggregating events around a specific interest area is important, and something that existing calendars only partially succeed at.

We also talked about the different types of groups and cultures within our community, loosely labeling them as business, new media, open source, and a fourth group that we called the X-factor or newbies: people who don’t know they’re part of our community until they see what kinds of events and groups are out there. Not requiring users to register an account with yet another centralized system seems important to serving many of these groups, since the existing tools they use reflect a range of preferences for connecting online. We then split into pairs/small groups to work on specific tasks.

Results:

* The existing group websites we examined can be imported much more easily with the addition of hCalendar markup for the event details. Selena and Daniel created documentation that we can share with event organizers (http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-tech-calendar/web/example-hcal-markup). We discussed the possibility of using a hCalendar generator to provide ready-made HTML to paste into websites and blogs.

* A next step for encouraging hCalendar usage will be to contact individual groups who aren’t using a standardized calendar format, and tell them about our project.

* Paige created a sample email template that can be used to structure event information, for organizers to cc to our system when they send out event announcements. Email seems to be the one tool everyone uses, and this would help with our goal of accessibility.

* Igal and I set up a new Rails application, and added it to a group repository at http://code.google.com/p/calagator/. The application now has a bare bones structure for adding and viewing events. We also decided that event venues were important attributes, and that combining information on venues across events would be highly useful, so users can now add and update venue information as well. We’re using a temporary view scaffolding system to allow us to add and edit information in the database. We’ll develop a more polished interface as we continue.

* In order to begin pulling sample data from websites, Igal and Reid are creating an hCalendar event importer. This can also be used as a model for adding other calendar formats to the system.

* Igal is going to set up our calendar program on a server where people will be able to try it out. Getting feedback early and often will be important to ensuring we’re meeting the needs of our users.

* Selena set up a new blog at http://calagator.wordpress.com/ to help us connect with the local tech community as we continue working on this. Thanks everyone who came and participated today, and thank you also to everyone who has contributed to the discussion online. The diagrams and resources on the pdx-tech-calendar website were very helpful as we began work.

We’ll be meeting again in two weeks, on February 2nd, for another round. Please feel welcome to attend whether or not you program or write HTML. We worked on many things that everyone can help with, including brainstorming, researching, and planning. Or if you have other skills you’d like to contribute, but don’t know how to get started, email the list and we’ll help.

We’re creating a calendar tool that solves a few problems:

1. Create a master calendar of tech events in Portland, OR.
2. Make it really easy for all the event schedulers to opt into the aggregation service.
3. Get the juicy details of what’s actually going to happen at each event in the same place.

Calagator is our name for the calendar aggregator software we’re writing.

You can find the google code project at http://code.google.com/p/calagator/

Our mailing list is at http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-tech-calendar

We’re just getting started, but through this blog you’ll be able to find summaries of our meetings, details about our master plan and our discoveries about what’s happening in Portland.