Making sense of events
The Problem
For so many libraries, figuring out how to display in-house events on our websites is a tough challenge. As we offer more content and services online, It’s important not to forget that online or in-bricks, we’re the same institution and those storefronts should complement each other.
Manchester took the route most libraries do when it comes to solving this problem, we contract with a calendaring provider. Ours provides administrative functions allowing us to track room bookings, program registrations, loan museum passes, and more as well as create a calendar to display next to our webpage. The problem, though, is very Web 2.0 vs 1.0. The content is attached to the software’s interface. There is no way to repurpose it. If someone wants to access our calendar they must visit that webpage - no arguments.
Speaking as a patron, this is mildly annoying; BUT as the person responsible for keeping our webpage up to date it’s downright infuriating. All the events that we want to publicize on the front page of our site must be hand entered and then hand removed when they’re outdated. For a library who hosted over 300 programs last year that can add up to a laborious and tedious (not to mention, expensive - time is money, you know) task. So far the solution has been to pick and choose what gets featured = a sad compromise.
If I ruled the world, my solution would be to migrate the whole site into Wordpress and be done with it, but I don’t. The city retains control over our site via a cms making that impossible. Nevertheless, the library is committed to creating a fully dynamic online branch. I decided to begin to solve both problems by making a distinction between a website (static and simple) and an online branch (dynamic and potentially confusing for beginners).
In short I could use the ‘online branch‘ to generate an events listing which I could then feed into the ‘website‘ thusly representing all library events on the front page in a timely fashion AND saving me the task of mucking around in html to do so.
The Solution - Generation
Enter Event Calendar. (Bless you, Alex.) It’s a Wordpress plugin specifically designed for handling events. You’ll find it deployed in slightly different forms at Tamworth as well as in my playground (sadly out of date now, but that’s for another day).
I began by installing and activating Events Calendar in my WP plugins directory and then entering a few events. To make this work, I had to configure it NOT to display events with regular posts, but in their own category only.
[Aside: the rad thing about Events Calendar is that you add events the same way you write a post, but it adds an option in the screen to define an associated date and time - this makes the magic happen.]
So from here, I get a nice list of the upcoming library events. Out of date events automatically drop off the list. And then, triumphantly, through the magic of Wordpress, I could get an upcoming events rss feed.
The Solution - Importation*
Now that I have my tidy little events feed, I needed to get it to automatically update in our static website. For this, I turn to Feedburner. This part is super-easy, actually, I simply add the events category feed as new, name it appropriately, and then configure Buzz Boost (under the Publicize tab) to republish is as html. Then I paste the generated javascript into the city’s content management system in the appropriate place and viola*!
Now Events can be entered one time, into wordpress and then accessed in the website, as a blog post, subscribed to in Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook, or any other calendaring application. Yay for the library getting in the path of the patron!
* I hope I just made that word up. It’s a good one.
** Potential extra step: tweaking the css a bit to get it to look pretty within the website.
