Wow, been a while since I've posted here. Sorry 'bout that (not that anyone is reading). I'm still thinking a lot about this idea, and have big plans. Those plans may swing into action soon.
In the mean time, here's a link to a
discussion on the hostbaby forums about calendar scraping & RSS. Very useful, I will return to that when I get to that point.
Also, the other day as I was idly thinking about event calendars and the idea of recurrence, I was pondering the question of how you integrate recurring events into a calendar as it goes into the future. JazzHouston has one approach - the recurring events (aka "weekly" gigs) are never shown integrated with the single events. I think that's a shame - if you're looking for what to do tonight, it's unlikely you'll think to check both regular and weekly gigs (at least, it's unlikely for me). The other option, of course, being to integrate the recurring events with the regular ones. The problem? You get lots of events in 2005, 2006, 2007, etc., and they're all recurring, and probably most of them won't actually be going on then.
So for recurring events, how far into the future do you go? My revelation about this was that you can guage the probable reliability of an event based on its
history. So if the event has been going for a month, well, it will probably go another month. If it's been going for 2 years, it'll probably go another 2 years. Or maybe the more appropriate equation is predicting half of the history - an event with 2 yrs of history gets 1 year prediction. (Of course, when you're creating recurring events, the ideal is to get the artist to say how long it'll go; but they often don't know.)
You also need a way for those recurring events to be canceled on particular dates, or have other "instance information" like special guests on a particular date, etc. So there needs to be some kind of division of labor, where the recurring event acts like a template that the specific events are generated for. And like Outlook recurring events, you probably need UI controls to ask whether someone intended to change the whole series or just the instance. Hmm.
