[hackerspaces] list of events

[Tilman Frosch]

Hi all,

Am Freitag, den 09.01.2009, 15:02 -0500 schrieb bre pettis:

> Alternately someone could just start a wiki page with events they know
> of and invite folks to fill it in. It won't be complete and won't get
> updated consistently, but that would be an easy start if you are
> craving it.

Das Labor is running a mix of the methods mentioned by Bre. We found
that it is a good idea to have some automated means of event
publication, as the manual way did not work out properly.
We organize our Events in the wiki and use a parser to generate xml from
the MediaWiki export (periodically). From the xml we generate the xhtml
included in our main website, a dedicated rss feed and an ical feed. The
xml file is also being used by a Jabber bot to announce upcomming events
to its subscribers (we wanted some push mechanism, too).

MediaWiki export:
http://www.das-labor.org/wiki/Spezial:Exportieren/Termine
xml: http://www.das-labor.org/termine.xml
rss: http://www.das-labor.org/termine.rss
ical: webcal://www.das-labor.org/termine.ics

I think a common xml structure might be a good start to provide
synchronized information. We could easily add tags like 
<country>DE</country>
<state>NW</state>
...
to filter by these criteria.

The parser and feed generators are written in Ruby, and should be fairly
easy to adapt. Our subversion repo is currently down, but I think I
could find all this stuff elsewhere, if anyone wants to have a look at
the code. It is a bit hackish, though ...

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to impose our solution on anyone, it is
just one of n possible solutions.


Til