RSS & Calendars

 RSS is great for getting updates on all of your websites without having to go through all the trouble of checking every site. One place it fails horrible is with calendars.

With a calendar, in an RSS feed you would want to be updated on events happening today, maybe in the next day or two. But what actually happens is the RSS feed picks up one one of two things, usually the creation date. So if someone creates a new event today, it will show up in my feed. But what if that event is for something way down the line. I done necessarily want that.

Im guessing that’s where you say, yeah, that’s how id expect it to work, id like to be updated on new events so I can add them to my calendar is I want.

So let’s look at this an other way. Say the RSS feed you are looking at is just for the calendar. Here is where it really fails in my mind. The list would be in order of content added. So the barbeque that was added a  day a go and is not until the spring would come before the event added just before it that is happening next week. The event dates have no meaning. So I know I said one of two ways to view them. There other is by date of event. Sound exactly what I am looking for right? Wrong!

Events would be ordered by the date of the event. But keep in mind that the barbecue is not happening till the spring. So if we have this calendar in with our other site, the article date  of the barbecue is months in the future, and will always be at the top of your reader until the date is past. But looking at a feed for just the calendar, events in the future would be at the top, events in the past would be at the bottom, and events happening soon would be somewhere in the middle. Not very useful.

So how do we fix this? Well I’m not so sure there is a way. I did come up with the idea that we could query the database for events happening from today on, and reverse the order by giving them fake dates and then just having the correct time and date in the article. But this would mess up so much stuff, and be really confusing. The only other alternative I see is only including events from today in it. But helping people plan for events becomes lost.