I HAVE been very keen to have a What's On service running on my This French Life website ever since a solution I was using did a "bait and switch" on me and many others.
For some time I'd been playing around with Google Calendar which let me add events and then display them on my site, but due to the size of France I knew a map would be equally useful for people.
Naturally I didn't want to be updating both a calendar and a map with the same info, I am a big fan of double the impact with half the effort, so when I crossed this article which explains how to bring Google Calendar and Maps together I had a go.
And so here you are, the This French Life What's On service.
It really is not that difficult to do, in a nutshell I set up a new, public calendar within my Google account and added the events you see there.
I decided not to run longer events across the full range of dates they were on and instead started them on the opening day and added a line to say when they were running until.
A short description from the articles I'd already written for This French Life about the events was added, as was a plain HTML link to the event's web page if it had one.
The key element that ensures the calendar hooks up with the map is a postcode, told you it was easy, so that when the I run the calendar's RSS feed through the process explained in the article above it spits out a KML feed URL that you paste into the search box in Google Maps.
Let the map plot the points and via the 'Link to the page' option in the top right hand corner of the map embed it on a website page.
Then when you update your calendar the map is updated automatically as well.
I can now ask people to just email me the simplest of details for an event, nothing special is required, and because the calendar is public Google will add it to its search results, hopefully ensuring the smallest of events find an interested audience.
If you've any questions about this please feel free to add a comment below and we can work them out together.
Bonus link: Pipes Mashup Turns Google Maps into a Blogging Tool
I gave this a go thinking that exactly the same application would be very useful as part of a development project I'm currently working on. Amazing!
Posted by: Gerry | February 01, 2008 at 23:02
Hi Gerry
Great to hear you've had a go at creating a What's On page, with a little patience you can plug all the elements together.
All the best
Craig
Posted by: Craig McGinty | February 03, 2008 at 11:17