thoughts on automation?

[yveskleinsky]

We are in the process of automating certain features on our site and I am stumped by how to link up multiple (different) calendars so they update automatically? Is this even possible?

...Granted, I won't be doing this- Tom from Aptohosting will- if it can be done.

 

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[GoldenEggs]

I want to do same thing. I'm assuming it's possible but I don't know how to do it myself. I asked our webguy if he could create a program/spider/bot/whatever it's called to search certain websites for events and have it posted to our master calendar and have it update automatically.

 

[Jonleehacker]

Yes, anything like that is possible. How easy it is to implement depends on the structure of your site and the source of the data that you are using to update your calendars.

For example if your events are being pulled from an xml source, like RSS, then it would be routine to automate a calendar. But even if it is just being scraped from another site, it is still not too tough, any decent web developer should be able to handle it.

 

[yveskleinsky]

Good to know! I think we have the calendar part figured out, now we need to figure out how to automate our merchant services acct. ...I will make this a new thread.

Thanks again!

 

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[AlwaysCurious]

Maybe you are looking for microformats that are a simple standard to embed calendar data (or pim data in general) in a machine readable format into your site. (See http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar) There are several Javascript solutions to read and Firefox extensions to even automatically extract this information and export it into calendar applications. Example I recently stumbled upon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4106 and a little explanation how to use it: http://labs.mozilla.com/2006/12/introducing-operator/

 

[yveskleinsky]

Wow- thanks Always Curious for all the help! I will be reaserching those sites to see if they match what we are trying to do.

++rep for being so helpful!