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Structured blogging: Silicon Valley/SF Tech Events blog

Last night I implemented my experiment in structured blogging. I now have a current as of right-now events blog. The feed works. Comments work (maybe for a posse style shout out?). We’ll see how it gets used. Being able to suck those entries down as iCal would rock.

The plugin I’m using comes from the pubsub guys, out of a project called Structured Blogging. In addition to events, the plugin easily accomodates reviews.

I’ve known about this for a couple weeks, after Mike came home with the plugin one night (where does he get this stuff?). I’ve been working with structured data, wanting to leverage the WordPress engine (feeds, search engine, and cms - in that order), but we were approaching bolting on more fields. This comes as an elegant solution to all my needs for getting an event blog up and running. I’ve (we’ve) been screwing around with calendars and social networking ideas for a couple months now, and it was good to find something feed-ready. This approach also offers promise for my booknotes/repository project. I’ve favored lodging the details in fields (author, date, etc), but there’s really no reason to not just jam the metadata in the main body of the post.

I was happy to see that (even though it took a while) this is still fairly fresh. I see others like Rajesh at Emerjic have picked up the thread. Usually I lag (and it’s taken me forever to get to playing with it).

Thanks a lot guys - I may have a programmer in the house, but that doesn’t mean I get custom tools made. This has given a great foundation from which to hack and play.

What exactly is this calendar? This is my take on what’s interesting around here. I live in Menlo Park and hate to drive, so things are definitely skewed local. I’ve added in old events going back to August. I’ve linked into to a/v files from places like ITConversations or the event’s own site. I haven’t done much cross linking between this blog and those events, but that’ll come.

Here’s some feedback and things that tripped me up. Nothing is horrendous, the install went smooth.

• Time wasters: I initally thought the sb time fields drove the “display date” in WordPress, but that is still controlled by the WordPress Date field. Essentially what this package gets you is an nice interface for inputting text and validated xml out. I’ve pulled the feed through Bloglines already and it looks good.
• Customization nits: I will probably modify my sb time fields to display 30 minute increments, rather than the hour now (I’ve erred in favor of making you early rather than late). Another area that didn’t quite fit my application was the sb role field. For some of these events, I’m clearly planning on attending. Others I help run. But there are many more that, while interesting, aren’t ones I plan on making. For those I’ve generally left the field blank. Still, as I look through the feed - the phrase “role: attendee” seems pretty lame. I’m not sure where this is headed - can these be customized to suit the user (à la Evite’s infinite variations on ‘yea’ ‘nay’ and ‘maybe’), or are these planned for indexing as universal (haha) values?
• Random weirdness: this plugin conflicts apparently with the ThreeStrikes comment spam plugin from Mark Ghosh (LaughingLizard). Before I disabled it, commenting sent me to fbi.gov. (I’ve even getting more rigourous about QA!)

I have more entries in the future to post, and more work to do in finding the proper organization. But tonight is Tony Perkins (I definitely have some work to do to bond with all the chick journalists, since I keep missing the boat) and the Wordpres party. I wonder if I get a hacker tiara?

So what’s next? I’m concerned about UI and if this info will make sense to people. I think I will pursue a “view by week”, calendar based approach similar to that used by WorkIT. That’ll evolve as I have the time and attention span to deal with such detailed work. :-)

Thanks guys for a well thought out solution to a irritating problem. Anyone who has a conduit, script or pointers for how to get my data between a calendar and blog more easily I’d love to hear from you. I’m on win, but using iCal’s ics in Mozilla (and Outlook too somewhat). There’s got to be a cheat for all this manual work. I’ll post if I find it.