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l008com · Oct 2, 2005, 02:32 PM

So I'm starting to jump on the RSS bandwagon and make RSS feeds for many of my sites. Most of them are news/blog like sites, or have some other thing that easily fits into the system of "tell RSS subscriber about this new thing". But I have one web site that has no news, no blog, and no new items per-say. It is a calendar driven web site, and all the 'articles' shown on the front of the page are upcoming events. So I'm not sure what the best way to handle this is. There is no pattern to when things get added. Different people are going to be adding and editing different events at different times. The only solution I can think of is to pick a particular number of days, and in the feed, show all the events that are happening in the next X days. But if I do it that way, how many days should I choose? I don't want it to be too many, if its a month in advance, people will have totally forgotten again by the time the event happens. If its too few days, it will be too late for many people to make plans.

Thoughts?

Randman · Oct 2, 2005, 02:38 PM

If you have Tiger, use Safari and Mail Contents Of This Page, Or the link, if you prefer.

If all the people are on Macs, you can publish in iCal and let the people subscribe to the calendar and it'll be synced on their computers. That would be the easiest and most-up-to-date.

Also, .Mac groups may have something that you need because you can share data with others but they need a @mac.com email address (free to sign up).

l008com · Oct 2, 2005, 02:41 PM

OK we're totally not on the same page. All of my sites are php/mysql. Making the RSS feed is no problem at all. The logic of what to put in it, on an event driven web site, is the issue. Also the site and calendar database already exist, I just need to add the feed.

Randman · Oct 2, 2005, 02:43 PM

Ahh, I see. Sorry about that. Reading it a second time, I'd have to ask why you would need an RSS feed for that if it's event-driven. A simple email reminder from time to time would suffice, would it not?

l008com · Oct 2, 2005, 03:00 PM

Well by that same argument, why RSS on news driven sites, when you could just email people the articles?

fugu13 · Oct 8, 2005, 03:09 PM

I would offer several RSS feeds:

Today's Events.

Tomorrow's Events.

This Week's Events

Next Week's Events.

If there aren't a huge number, This Month's Events (and Next Month's Events).

Possibly a "Recent Events" feed and an "Upcoming Events" feed, which just have the last/next ten or twenty events, not on any particular time scale.

I'd also generate an ical file equivalent to each of those feeds, so people can just point their calendar program at that and see the events, and an ical file for each event, and have a link to that as well as the event's site page in the RSS feed, so if people want to add a specific event to their calendar they only need to click.

l008com · Oct 8, 2005, 03:14 PM

yeah i can look into the ical stuff at a later date, i just want to get the rss feeds nailed down first
this isn't a computer related web site so i think keeping it simple will help things, so I'm leaning towards a 'this week' feed. Or maybe a this week and a this month. Or maybe i'll do those two as presets, but with the number of days in the feed's URL, so the techy among us can simply customize the feed any way they choose.