BPS
has an immediate need to improve our event calendar at the Toronto
Blues Society
The current Google
plug-in <www.torontobluessociety.com/live-blues> pulls
the data from:
In addition, the data
must be exported and formatted for our weekly email blast, Where It's At - sorted
by date including the repeating events
…and for the
MapleBlues newsletter - sorted by venue, starting with Toronto events (filtered
using tel area code) and ending with repeating events (sorted by day)
There will also be
some formatting issues (date format, bolding on Venue Name)
Additional features on
the wish list would be to have website links for the venue and artist as well
as a hidden field for a contact email. It would also be very cool to enable
users to "Add Event to my Calendar" (Google or iCal) and share on
social media. I would also like to share with
After years of
searching, we haven’t had any success getting the code/scripts (either within
the Google docs or using excel scripts/pivot tables, etc) that can streamline
this weekly process which burns up many hours of blues society staff and
volunteer time. Perhaps it’s just as well that it took this long, because if we
had created a calendar five years ago it would not have accommodated all these
mobile devices and it would not be able to share. Now we live in a world where
the artist and venue can publish their event in one place and have it shared
everywhere they want, other websites and event calendars, social media, etc.
What follows is an earlier pitch with some features that could be incorporated later BPS has been publishing newsletters, directories and websites for numerous clients in the non-profit arts sector over the last 20 years and we are continuously trying to develop a better system to enable/encourage contributors to submit their event listings directly, to enable the clients to proof and approve the content before it's published and to work remotely.
The current workflow still involves a lot of manual work that could be done automatically with some additional scripting and programming to allow for flexible importing and exporting of the content, in particular:
(this mailing list in continually updated with email addresses of anyone who submits a listing) • Listings are received:  http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pjG13HE0t2xjQKjWARAtzcQ  Results from the forms are loaded into the spreadsheet which is automatically updated and can be viewed by anyone at: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pjG13HE0t2xjQKjWARAtzcQ   And as a day-by-day calendar... (we need to be able to import and export in this format)   Every occurence of a venue name will display a pop-up window with list of all events at that venue and a link to a map. • Below are more examples of how this content gets re-purposed:     |
Blainco Publishing Solutions
