Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 21:45:41 -0700 From: "Murray Stokely" <murray@stokely.org> To: freebsd-www@freebsd.org Cc: Ludovic Hirlimann <ludovic@hirlimann.net> Subject: Events page integration with upcoming.yahoo.com Message-ID: <2a7894eb0806082145m69d6e791uf158da0d4f254385@mail.gmail.com>
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Ludovic Hirlimann sent a mail to marketing@ this week suggesting that we integrate our events page with upcoming.yahoo.com. The first part of this process is now complete. All upcoming events on http://www.FreeBSD.org/events/ now include a link to a search result page for the event name on upcoming, so that interested parties can see who else is attending, post pictures, arrange a carpool, or whatever. I also added links from all past events to the Flickr and Google Blog Search result pages for the event name as the query. This provides quick access to pictures, trip reports, presentations, etc after the events are over. The more interesting part of the problem would be to integrate our events.xml database more directly into upcoming so that events in one would automatically show up in the other. I started writing some XSLT and Perl code to use the API (http://upcoming.yahoo.com/services/api/) to search for events. After checking that an event doesn't exist, my script attempts to find the metro area, venue, and other details in the upcoming service and then creates a new event as the 'FreeBSD Events' user. Of the four upcoming events listed in events.xml, two were already listed on upcoming. The NYCBSDCon 2008 entry (http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/776363) was added automatically by the script, but the script failed to find an appropriate metro area for the 9th Libre Software Meeting so it could not export this to upcoming. If I can make the script a little more robust I will set it up in cron to automatically add events that we add to events.xml into upcoming.yahoo.com. My approach was to extract the relevant data for upcoming events from events.xml into a simple text format with XSLT : http://people.freebsd.org/~murray/patches/templates.events2upcoming.xsl. The text output is then parsed and sent to Upcoming using the WebServices::Upcoming Perl module (after patching it to work properly, http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=36567). Patches to improve this process are welcome. Now it only we had a video hosting site that hosted technical videos from BSD conferences we'd be set. For some reason, we are not as good at posting videos from conferences onto YouTube as we are at posting pictures onto Flickr and writing trip report blog posts. - Murray
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