Event Calendars - Other Uses For RSS

Apparently a hot new use of RSS is event calendars (links found via A Feed Is Born - see below). The basic idea is that you add items to the calendar using a visual paradigm. Then you "publish" a corresponding RSS feed that friends, family and fans can subscribe to. Quite an interesting idea, and certainly not a use that had occurred to me.

I signed up for RSS Calendar and 30 Boxes, both of which are in beta (isn't everything :?). Both their TOUs (Terms of Use) indicate that they have a non-exclusive license to re-use any content you post via their calendars. This seems okay by me, since I can't imagine what I'd add to a public ly availlable event calendar that I'd worry about having republished.

For me, personally, finding out about these RSS-based calendars seems rather timely. Yesterday, I was lamenting that I didn't have an easy, calendar-based way to indicate when I had posted to my many weblogs on a given day. I tried to enter such information on both calendars, and had the following experiences:

RSS Calendar:

RSS Calendar forces you to choose a calendar category when you sign up. I saw no way to change categories in the UserCP (user control panel).

You cannot enter HTML tags for any of the information, however you can enter an URL to associate with each event you enter.
I had trouble accessing my RSS feeds via the two RSS readers I tried (feedreader and Newsfox).
RSS Calendar has multiple feeds based on different periods of time: daily, weekly, monthly, rolling 30-day, 3-month, current year, and all events. Personally, I think that this is a bit much, given that most RSS readers allow you to delete older items.

30 Boxes:

You are not restricted to a certain type of calendar, as is the case with RSS Calendar.
You cannot enter HTML tags for any of the information, but there are several options for providing URLs, and you can actually track your own web feeds. Each day of your calendar will show entries across all the webfeeds that you are tracking, for as far back as the actual feeds go.

To track these feeds, I seemed to have to add some of them several times before I did not get an error about the feed.

Keep in mind that I didn't spend a great deal of time on either one, but overall, I find 30 Boxes more attractive, easier to use, and the ability to track multiple web feeds gives it added value for me. I now have a simple way to display all of my weblog entries posted on each day. For my own purposes, it gives me a birdseye view of my productivity for each day.

Unfortunately, the layout of the 30 Boxes control panel is a bit obscure. I got the impression that the public can only view your calendar if you let them add you as a buddy on a one-by-one basis. (There is a chicklet graphic available for this purpose.) The general public can, however, get a list of the feeds you are tracking, but the posts are grouped by website, not by date. However, when I added the RSS feed (choice of Entire or Shared views) to two of my feed readers, I was able to click on individual headline items, then on the "more/ read on" link within an item's description to get a view of my calendar. So I presume that despite instructions to the contrary in the UserCP, the calendar is viewable by anyone through your feed.

I did notice an unusual bug in my Newsfox reader (extension for Firefox browser). When I refreshed my 30 Boxes calendar feed, the current day's headlines to the item list. This happens each time I refresh the feed. Since this behaviour doesn't occur in feedreader, I'm assuming that there's some sort of incompatibility between 30 Boxes and Newsfox.

Keep in mind that both services are still in beta. I hope they'll take their time to weed out these sorts of things. What I'd like to see are additional calendar views that you can assign to different groups of users. Nevertheless, both services have their benefits. I know I'll be using at least 30 Boxes. If you are publishing your own website, you can probably find numerous promotional uses for your own public calendar.

If you want to see a sample calendar, subscribe to this feed in your favourite feed reader/ aggregator and click on the headline items. Move your mouse around each square of the resulting calendar to see a popup div layer displaying my weblog posts for a given day. This is merely an example calendar.

Links/ Sources: RSS Calendar; 30 Boxes; A Feed Is Born.; sample

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