Right Up Top

In honor of the large amount of summer shows coming up, I thought I’d add the list of shows I’m planning to attend to the site. And since I’m a lazy bastard who has no desire to maintain a show list in more that one place, I hatched a devious scheme. Don’t let the simplicity of show list you see at the left decieve you… that thing has a dynamic lifecycle all it’s own. Here’s how it gets generated:

• I maintain a separate calendar in my email/calendar program, Bloomba. This calendar contains only shows, with the performer name and venue in the title and description of the event.
• Using Bloomba’s calendar publishing feature, I set it to autogmagically publish my calendar hourly to iCal Exchange, which is a free site that hosts iCal calendar files. The HTML version of the published calendar can be viewed here.
• Using PHP on the blog, I download the ICS version of the calendar hosted at iCal Exchange and parse it using a code chunk I found here, then I do some venue information lookup in local table and display the results.

What does this mean for you? Absolutely nuthin’ ™. But I can add a show to my Treo or to my calendar in Bloomba and minutes later it will automatically appear on the blog. Hooray for me!

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