What if? Journalists had to reference sources...
No matter how they're viewed at home, the BBC remains in my view the international gold standard for news, information, and entertainment. God bless'em. And could you imagine any other "news organisation" (a.k.a. pernicious purveyors of distracting deceits) going so far as to require ".. inline links must go to primary sources only– eg scientific journal article or policy report .. " in their new linking guidelines?
You can find a brilliant argument for why this might be a good idea in Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks
Blogarhythm: Don't Lie - Black Eyed Peas Update 17-Oct-2011: Ben Goldacre had a good rant about Bad Science at TED this year:
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McCheeky
Blogarhythm: Top Jimmy - Mean Street (covering Van Halen)
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Add to Calendar with a jQuery Widget
If you deal with any kind of event-based information on your websites, you would probably really like an easy way of letting users add it to their calendar.
Unlike link sharing—where there are some great drop-in solutions like AddToAny and AddThis—calendar integration unfortunately remains a bit rough around the edges. Varying standards with varying degrees of adoption; consideration for desktop and web-based calendar clients; and the complicating factor of timezones make it all a bit harder than it really should be.
AddToCal is a jQuery UI Widget that I put together to help me solve the problem and do things like you see in the screen clip on the right. It's freely shared and available on github.
Using it on a web page is as simple as including the js links, binding it to the DOM elements or classes on your page that contain "events", and provide an implementation of the getEventDetails method that knows how to extract the event details from your particular DOM structure.
The example also demonstrates how to use AddToCal in conjunction with the hCalendar microformat for event notation (try it out here).
I've currently included support for the web-based calendars by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live. If you can serve iCal or vCalendar format event links then AddToCal also links to 30boxes and iCal/vCalendar desktop software—including the iPad Calendar application;-)
Serving iCal and vCalendar links
What about iCal and vCalendar formats? These are complicated a little because we need a URL to the respective iCal and vCalendar format resources .. so we need to be able to serve them before AddToCal can link to them.
Thankfully, this can be relatively trivial once you get a handle on the file formats. Here's an example of how to implement with Ruby on Rails.
Say we have an Events controller and associated Event model that represents an activity people may like to add to their calendars. A simple iCal implementation with ERB means creating a views/events/show.ics.erb along these lines:
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//AddToCal Example//EN
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:<%= @event.start_time.rfc3339 %>
DTEND:<%= @event.end_time.rfc3339 %>
LOCATION:<%= event_url( @event ) %>
SEQUENCE:0
UID:
DTSTAMP:<%= Time.zone.now.rfc3339 %>
DESCRIPTION:<%= event_url( @event ) %>\n<%= @event.full_title %>
SUMMARY:<%= @event.synopsis %>
PRIORITY:5
CLASS:PUBLIC
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR
Sharp eyes will note the unusual rfc3339 helper method I've provided to make it easy to get date/times in RFC3339 format as required by the iCal and vCal standards. You could extend Time::DATE_FORMATS, but here I've simply added the method to ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone
class ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone
def rfc3339
utc.strftime("%Y%m%dT%H%M%SZ")
end
end
To support vCalendar, we also implement views/events/show.vcs.erb
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//AddToCal Example//EN
VERSION:1.0
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:<%= @event.full_title %>
PRIORITY:0
CATEGORIES:SHOW
CLASS:PUBLIC
DTSTART:<%= @event.start_time.rfc3339 %>
DTEND:<%= @event.end_time.rfc3339 %>
URL:<%= event_url( @event ) %>
DESCRIPTION;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:<%= event_url( @event ) %> =0A<%= @event.synopsis %>
LOCATION;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:<%= event_url( @event ) %>
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR
Depending on your Rails version and web server, you may have to teach it about these MIME types e.g. add to config/initializers/mime_types.rb:
Mime::Type.register "application/hbs-vcs, text/calendar, text/x-vcalendar", :vcs
Blogarhythm: Remember - Jimi Hendrix
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12 Things Every Programmer Should Know
Samnang Chhun posted his neat little presentation from BarCamp Phnom Penh 2010. It's a good summary of the leading memes of the moment..
Blogarhythm: everybody wants the same thing - scissor sisters
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