In short, everything! The DC Tech Events of old was just a Google Calendar, pasted into the center of a web page. It was hardly even a website.
(This stuff applies to Baltimore Tech Events too– except that it didn’t even exist until last night)
Now, this new thing?
Without even getting into the stuff that makes the site easier to manage for editors, here’s four things that make the site not just better than Ye Olde Teche Eventse, but (IMHO) an improvement over existing, similar sites.
- Real links! Go ahead, click one– I’ll wait. If an event has an “official” site, that’s what we’ll try to link to– right on the front page. We put as little friction as possible between you and the definitive source of information on an event.
- Tags. If you want to see all of the upcoming PHP events, and even subscribe to just those events in iCal, Outlook, or Sunbird– you can.
- Submitting events is easy. No need to use a third party site (or worse, email me and hope for the best), just click “add an event”.
- If your group produces an iCalendar feed (many do, in particular, every group that uses Meetup) it’s even easier– submit the iCal URL once and we’ll start pulling in your events automatically.
That’s really just a sample– the things that will be most valuable to casual users or event contributers. I could easily go on (for instance, I’m really proud of the permalink system for weeks and days) or describe the improvements I’ll be making in the coming weeks.
I do in fact plan on going over the new features and improvements I’m working on– but in another post. Stay tuned.
I didn’t necessarily intend to do this last night, but Baltimore Tech Events is live!
With this weekends re-launch of DC Tech Events, EVENTGRINDER moves from being a mostly theoretical collection of ideas, promises, and half-working code, to a real working thing in the world (well, the Internet).
I’m working on two posts for tonight– a “What’s new on DC Tech Events” for DCTE readers, and “What’s next for EVENTGRINDER” that updates the previously posted roadmap.
The short version, if you’re following along with the roadmap– the “EVENTGRINDER 0″ and Milestone 1 items are all more or less working, and my next goalpost is integration with Mailchimp and Twitter.
I’m skipping ahead a little on the roadmap. I’m taking a day off from the day job, tomorrow, with the goal of making this part of EVENTGRINDER really work:
The stuff I have working right now allows for users to submit events, and one or more editors to curate the submissions. This is an important bit of functionality, that I haven’t seen implemented anywhere else (at least in a way I find satisfying, as the publisher of an event calendar). I’m really proud of how simple both event submission and managing the queue are.
But, deep down, the thing I want to see working the most is the aggregator, and I want that in place before I start eating the dogfood.
This is primarily a function of laziness– sure, I could write a one-off migration script to import the current DC Tech Events database, but this would still require a lot of cutting and pasting (in particular, because of the link-centric nature of EVENTGRINDER. Links aren’t really a concept Google Calendar understands, except when embedded in descriptions). I’d really much rather build my list of sources, start pulling in the events that can be gathered automatically, and then fill in the gaps.
