Your Search Terms, Direct to your Calendar

As we’ve been working on Calagator, I’ve told people “we want you to be able to have a calendar with only the Ruby and beer events if that’s what you like” as our goal for tagging, search, and feeds. This weekend we accomplished that goal. Now, if you enter a search term into the box in the upper right corner of the page, you’ll be offered Atom and iCalendar feeds to subscribe to. It’s a proud moment.

OSCON attendees might like to try this OSCON search.

With this update, we’re most of the way to our 1.0 milestone. The remaining items are recurring events, and creating a Calagator user guide to share with our user communities, both of which we’ll be tackling at future code sprints. And of course there are always bugs. You can help us as always by using Calagator, entering your events, and letting us know of any problems via Get Satisfaction and our issue tracker.

This Week on Calagator

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.

Two Work Sessions This Week

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.

What’s this all about anyway?

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.