[conspire] July schedule posted

[Tony Godshall]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> Quoting Tony Godshall (tony at of.net):
>
> > Interesting.
> >
> > So you want the calendar generated dynamically?
> >
> > Why?
>
> Um, no.  I never said anything about wanting any calendar (other than
> BALE's) to be generated dynamically.
>
> We seem to somehow miscommunicating.  I am not 100% sure of what that
> miscommunication is, but one guess is that you have conceived the
> problem to be addressed in some radically different fashion from the way
> I have.
>
> I understood the problem to be offering iCalendar format, as a
> convenience to a rather small group of users, including yourself, who
> actually use it and prefer it.
>
> Therefore, I understood you to be attempting to write Python code able
> to grab the event data generated by BALE's output, and/or present on the
> CABAL page, parse out the respective page's data, and create a
> downloadable iCalendar file based on that data.
>
> The application "PHP iCalendar" is a Web viewer / display application
> able to present one or more iCal data file's contents to the public.
> To a limited extent, it is also usable as a data format validator for
> iCal files, in the sense that any data file it chokes on almost
> certainly has big problems.
>
> As I suggested in my separate posting, have a good look at the current
> almost-complete BALE data displayed from bale.ics on
> http://linuxmafia.com/calendar/ , and then compare that against the full
> current dataset's display on http://linuxamfia.com/bale/ .  I hope
> you'll agree that PHP iCalendar is prettier but less functional for the
> actual needs of technical people wanting to know what's coming up in the
> Bay Area.
>
> I put a copy of the bale.ics within PHP iCalendar's data directory in
> order to look it over, and also to test whether it's valid and useful
> iCal at all.  (Iniitally, it was not, until I did some repairs to your
> script.)
>
> If, hypothetically, we were to fix the two remaining problems with your
> script -- year rollover, and inability to process events without
> start/stop times -- then I could create a cronjob to regenerate bale.ics
> periodically (wget, then run your script), and create a download link
> from the BALE page.  I could optionally also refresh the copy in PHP
> iCalendar's data directory, thereby giving folks an alternate view of
> that data plus an RSS feed.
>
> That would be nice.
>
>
> > I would have set up make to build a static html version of the calendar
> > anytime its vcalendar source file changed.  That way the webserver is
> light
> > and fast and static.
>
> A guess:  You seem to be assuming that I am intending to convert
> everything over from backending in MySQL (in the case of BALE) and flat
> HTML (in the case of the CABAL page).  I never said I'd be doing that,
> and I definitely have no such intention.  It would be particularly
> stupid to lose MySQL as the back-end to BALE.
>
>
> Before we discuss further, we should make sure we both understand what's
> going on and what problem is on the table.
>
>
> > You only need dynamicism if the calendar is read-write, no?  I've
> certainly
> > set up webcalendar's icalendar support for that (with thunderbird +
> > lightning- not 100% satisfactory).  But in this instance, you want a
> > easy-to-maintain icalendar file that others have RO access to (a simple
> http
> > url) plus an HTML version of same for the web page.
>
> I'm sorry, but when on earth did I talk about maintaining iCalendar
> files?   I'm treating it so far as an export format -- which outcome
> your almost-functional script comes rather close to permitting.  Which
> would be cool.


Yes, we do seem to be miscommunicating a bit.

I did not infer the details of your MySQL template system from what you had
said so far. But now you've explained it a bit more and I think I see where
you are coming from a bit better.

We did both observe or agree that iCalendar/vCalendar files were easy to
edit.
They also have the repetition issues solved.  I stated that the way I would
do
things would be to use them as the source.  And to generate the HTML from
that.  I did not say you had to do it that way.  Regardless of which
direction
you choose to go, a tool to build iCalendar from HTML appeared to be a good
first step, so I took a hack at that.

If you want a good generalized to/from iCalendar tool that'll handle a lot
of the niceties for you better than your improved version of my hack,
perhaps this would be a better tool:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/icalendar/2.0.1

Tony
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/attachments/20090707/a207d76b/attachment.html>