Blog Talk, Blog Tech roundup - Event Calendar synchronization between web sites desired

By Jeff Buster

Created 03/02/2007 - 09:38

In response to the “Blog Talk, Blog Tech" promoted last week on Realneo and held last Saturday at Arabica, the following blog enthusiasts took the time to attend: Marc Lefkowitz (of Green City Blue Lake blog http://www.gcbl.org/ [1] ), Lee Batdorff (University Circle blog www.ClevelandCircle.org [2] ), Gloria and Tim Ferris (Brewed Fresh Daily blog http://www.brewedfreshdaily.com/ [3] ), Eh Hauser (NeoBridge Blog http://www.neobridge.net/ [4] ) and Norm Roulet, Susan Miller, Sudhir Raghupathy, Jeff Buster, Martha Eakin, Evelyn Kiefer, Bill MacDermott, Chaya Compton and others (from Realneo.us blog http://realneo.us/ [5] ) .

Thanks everyone for showing up and refreshing our acquaintances.

Due to the too-talkative civic passion of most of the attendees, there was, (in my hindsight opinion as a too-lenient moderator of the meeting) not enough “class” time spent on technical advancement. Next meeting let’s concentrate on advancing the tech quality and effectiveness of the blogs. Although we didn't get much "tech" accomplished at the Saturday meeting (though Bill is now posting great photos!), one issue where there was common ground was that all bloggers (from the 5 distinct web sites) would like to have the option of synchronizing “events” and “calendar” sections of their blogs reciprocally with other blogs of their choosing.

The event syncro would be accomplished via a software module that would work across independent web sites. For example, if an ODOT meeting date were posted on NeoBridge, the goal would be that GCBL, Realneo, and any other blog could have pre-approved syndication with the other web site(s) to automatically allow the ODOT event posting to appear on their site’s “event” calendar. This syncro would eliminate having to log in and post the event at each website - where the poster believes there is a compatible audience for the event. The ease of posting events will expand the effectiveness of blogs, get more persons out to events, and stimulate both the civic sphere and the blogging sphere. It will aid in the democratization of NEO. And , of course, the module integrated in Drupal would have global usefullness.

As a practical start, I considered that GCBL, Neobridge, and Realneo use open source Drupal Content Management Software to run their sites. BFD and UnivCircle use other software. To begin with, I thought it would be sensible to find if there were an existing event sync module for the Drupal sites. So I posted the following on Drupal.org.

Event calendar distribution to/and sycronization of, between multiple drupal web sites

Jeff Buster@rea... [6] - February 25, 2007 - 19:34

Project:	Event
Version:	HEAD
Component:	Basic Event
Category:	feature
Priority:	normal
Assigned:	Unassigned
Status:	active

Here is the background of the practical issue I desire to resolve: I am blogging on www.realneo.us [7] in Northeast Ohio (NEO). Realneo is a Drupal site which, along with other NEO Drupal sites, is involved in civic and environmental posting and discussion.
I am constantly reading other site’s event calendars and then copying events to Realneo’s event calendar. This takes attention and time. I also log in and post events on other sites.

The Drupal feature that I desire is an event module which supports automatic syndication of events posted to one Drupal calendar to other Drupal calendars (whose administrators) chose to subscribe to the syndication.

Let’s say we have Drupal web sites A, B, C who conduct discussions involved with wind energy. The Administrator of A, would set permissions to allow/disallow event postings on any or all of the other sites to automatically be uploaded to the A calendar. Administrators of B and C would have similar permissions.

This way, rather than forcing a citizen - who is trying to inform the public about a lecture on wind energy - to log in at A, B, and C to post the event, each site administrator would determine which other sites – usually sites with similar content interests – would be automatically syndicated and published to their events calendar.

I see event syndication as a critical element of web democratization: more rapidly and effectively connecting individuals with real world events in which they are interested.

Thanks in advance for any direction to an existing module, or, if there is no such existing software, to a development group for such a module. I am interested in determining the parameters and cost of such a module.

Please advise if I have submitted this issue in less than the best catagory (ie "project", "version","component".

Best,

Jeff Buster

Updates

tracking.

Links:
[1] http://www.gcbl.org/
[2] http://www.clevelandcircle.org/
[3] http://www.brewedfreshdaily.com/
[4] http://www.neobridge.net/
[5] http://realneo.us/
[6] http://drupal.org/user/45209
[7] http://www.realneo.us/
[8] http://drupal.org/node/122583#comment-205186
[9] http://drupal.org/user/16094