Category: social-hardware

Been thinking about this once again, and reality has started to shows its face again.

First up, I think the grabbing of louise ferguson's events page, would be too much work for small gain. So until she changes the format of the page so the content is seprated from the style there is little I can do. Its just too messy and theres too much inconsistency for me to write a xsl to transform the page into useable content.

I have however been thinking of other ways of doing what louise has done.
I first thought of creating a blog for events. Sounds perfect right? You know you have the calendar already there, the ability to search via category's, etc, etc. But there was a major problem which came up when I started thinking deeper. When you write a blog that is the date of the blog, just like this one is actually being written at 2am in the morning on Sunday 5th October. But if you wanted to blog a event, the event would have had to have happened. Which is no good because no one would then know about it till the day! Not much good you would say.
So i need to be able to change the actual date of the blog to certain specified date. Sounds easy enough, and maybe it is but not without some serious hacksawing of a blog server. The other way would be to touch the blog on the filesystem. But who would want to do that and who would allow people from outside to do such a thing. The last option I thought about was using the metablog mechanism. See usually theres a small amount of meta posted hence

#Thu Aug 21 13:44:45 BST 2003
blog-entry-author=ianforrester

Now if I could work out how to add – blog-event-date=20031027 which obvioulsy means 27th October 2003 and get the blog server to read that as the post date. We would be cooking!

So even thought the last idea would be fantastic, I'm forced to think about another solution because I want to start putting events up for my students soon. And of course for those interested in whats on in London.

So I've been looking at the ical format from two points of view.
I'm using Mozilia's Calendar and exporting the events as ical rdf and xml then putting them on my webdav server. The other view point i'm looking at it from is the ical spec. which is large and quite scarey in some parts, but its for the non xml version which is a problem but gives me a good idea of names and whats possible. Heres a example of a event i'm going to in 2 weeks time.
The completely xml version and The rdf xml version. So whats my next step, well I can easily write a pipeline in cocoon which will pick up all ical's in that directory and using xsl pull out the title and arrange them by there event date. so you would agree that is a good start for now. If i get time tomorrow I'll do it, but I know I got a few other tasks to do before this.

Ok I've hit a brick wall it would seem.
The issue is a very simple one, Cocoon wont accept Louise's non-valid html at all. I've defined a pipeline using jtidy which is the java version of html tidy, so the html from this source should be cleaned up before its used in a xsl transformation.
This isnt happening at all, and in the end i'm getting this instead. You can clearly see the title which is valid xhtml, but as soon as it hits anything non valid it throws a 500 servelet exception.

I have two paths forward, manually rewrite louises html into a file I can use or talk to louise about writing things in standard xhtml. The last one is the most difficult, because looking at her site, its all written using the same template. I dont want to add work to louise because this should be do-able with cocoon.
Oh heres the link for the clean one I'm working on.

Its bizarre how these things happen or better still how they start happening.
I while ago I wanted to create some kind of ical service which would allow a small community of designers to share calender dates. And it kind of work except for one thing. You need more than just a webdav server to allow multiple people to change one ical file. Damm I thought, oh well move on.
But its been bugging me still, and when I met Louise Fergonson at this AIGA event. The memories started coming back.

See Louise actually manually keeps a kind of blog of upcoming events in London which designers would be interested in going to. I personally found it great and attended the Spiked gone to the blogs event because of her.

So whats the problem then? Well the problems are these.

I can not sydicate the events, which may sound pretty pettie but it means I have to return to her events page everytime I want to check.

I still have to manually copy and paste events into outlook or any other calender program I'm using.

So yes these may sound pettie, and I dont want to put down the seriously hard work Louise has put into the events page. But with a bit of xml magic, it shouldnt be a problem to create a rss feed and a icalendar.

How is this possible? Well this is in theory and quickly,
Louise's Html seems pretty messed up, it doesnt validate as xhtml as there is no doctype or things like that. So I will run it thought Cocoon's html tidy pipeline then start using xsl to filter out all the navigation and stuff, at which I should be left with only the content. Another xsl pipeline (or the same?) will turn the content into structured xml (may use ical or invent my own for now). Once its in that format I can turn it into anything I like. I am going to create rss feed to start off with then go about creating icals.
Will expalin better later, if that made no sense.