The 2mm Calendar

The 2mm Calendar is hosted on the Google Calendar service. Its a multi-user calendar, so if you have an event you wish to add, contact the webmaster, and he can give you permission to add and change entries on the calendar.

The Calendar is totally dependent on member's adding information; if you don't add it, it doesn't appear. So, don't be shy, put your event on the Calendar !

Main things to consider when adding to the calendar:

• Have a short informative title (which will be the main link in the panel to the right), it makes it easier to read. A title like "Model Show" isn't very helpful, whereas name of layout appearing is useful. Don't include the venue in the title, that goes elsewhere.
• Know the date !
• Fill in where the event takes place, if you can, include a post code or proper postal address. Then the "map" feature will point to the venue.
• Don't put website addresses (URLs) in the description area. Instead, add a "discussion comment" to the calendar with any web addresses
• You can add items well into the future, but the panel to the right only shows 6 months ahead. It will automatically show your event once its within six months. It also ignores old events (more than a few days in the past).
• The website panel can take up to 12 hours to update. This is deliberate, the 2mm site holds a cache of the Google Calendar to help moderate the network traffic.

How the technical website stuff works.

The Google Calendar is available in several data forms; iCal, XML and HTML.

I'm using the XML feed to produce the panel to the right. This is processed initially by SimplePie, which is a free script to process XML files, typically used for RSS news feeds.

From the SimplePie data, its fairly simple to extract some of the entries and format them for display. Now using version 0.7 of the script Google Calendar with a few simple additions/changes to suit my needs. My PHP code is available on request.

The 2mm Site uses SimplePie for the "whats new" on the main page which collates activity from blogs and other websites.

Apple Mac Safari Browser Bug.

(August 2007) There is a bug with the GoogleCalendar and the Safari browser on an Apple Mac (the version of Safari for Windows seems to work OK). Google say they only support Safari 2.0.3 and 2.0.4. Unfortunately the newest Safari is 3.x, which Google say isn't supported yet. Worse, for older versions, 1.xx, there are reports that the Calendar page will just cause the Safari browser to quit.

Apart from monitor the situation, I am somewhat powerless to fix this. I could remove the entire calendar tool and thus make it unavailable for all, or I can do as I am at present, which is wait and hope that Google will fix their underlying code. If anyone notices new options for the Calendar which will make it more compatible with Safari, please let me know.

Apparently, it all works fine in Firefox on a Mac, so that option remains open to Mac users.

Google Links:

• Link 1
• Link 2