You can haz Austin Tech Events Widget without WordPress!

Not too long ago I posted about the Austin Tech Events Plugin for WordPress. Several folks asked me how to install it sans WordPress or in a older version of WordPress that doesn’t support widgets. Well I’ll tell ya’.

Step 1. Download the latest version of the Austin Tech Events widget and upload it to a subdirectory on your site.

Step 2. Go get yourself a Google GDATA API key here.

Step 3. Add the following code to the head section of your site. Note the sections in red. You need to add your Google API Key and be sure to change the paths below to reflect where you uploaded the Austin Tech Events widget folder.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=YOU GOOGLE API KEY GOES HERE"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
	var calendarURL = 'http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/i8m14fqigtkhpj744qml1vht920bq5j0%40import.calendar.google.com/public/full';
	var pageMaxResults = 15;
	var parseWiki = true;
	var showNav = true;
	var weeks = null;
	var widgetListSize = null;
</script>
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/css/thickbox.css" />
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/css/style.css" />
<script type="text/javascript">
	function addLoadEvent(func) {
		var oldonload = window.onload;
		if (typeof window.onload != 'function') {
			window.onload = func;
		} else {
			window.onload = function() {
			if (oldonload) {
				oldonload();
			}
				func();
			}
		}
	}
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/js/date.js?ver=alpha-1"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/js/jquery.js?ver=6124"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/js/thickbox.js?ver=3.1"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/js/wiky.js?ver=1.0"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/js/functions.js?ver=0.85"></script>

Step 4. Add the following code to body of you page. Place it wherever you want the widget to show up.

<ul>
	<li id="austin-tech-events" class="widget widgetWPNGCalendar">
		<h2 class="widgettitle"><a href="http://door64.com/event">Austin Tech Events</a></h2>
			<div id="wpng-cal-widget-events" style="display:none;"></div>
			<div id="wpng-cal-load-widget" class="wpng-cal-loading">
				<img class="wpng-cal-image" alt="loading..." src="/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/images/loading_large.gif"/>
			</div>
		<div>
			<script type="text/javascript" defer="defer">
				widgetListSize = 5;
				addLoadEvent(loadCalendarWidget);
			</script>
		</div>
	</li>
</ul>

That’s all there is to it. Check out the example I created of the Austin Tech Events Plugin installed on WordPress 1.5.2. Proof it can be done! 😉 The biggest disadvantage to this approach is that you won’t be notified of code updates like you would on a proper WordPress 2.5 widget install.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Austin Tech Events Calendar WordPress Plugin

Want to promote the tech community in Austin? This is your WordPress plugin! You can see an example of the plugin on my blog’s sidebar.

The Austin Tech Events Calendar plugin is a “branch” of the wpng-calendar, a WordPress plugin for integrating a Google calendar into your WordPress blog. I’ve customized it to best display events from the door64.com events calendar.

To install this plugin:

  1. Download it from here
  2. Upload the plugin to the “wp-content/plugins” directory in your WordPress installation
  3. Activate the plugin in your WordPress admin panel
  4. Go get yourself a Google GDATA API key here
  5. In your WordPress admin panel, goto “Options -> Austin Tech Events” then enter your Google GDATA API key. If you’re running WordPress 2.5, look under “Settings -> Austin Tech Events.”
  6. Under “Presentation -> Widgets” add the widget to your side bar, alter the options if you like

That’s it!

For more information about this plugin checkout the documentation from the the wpng-calendar site.

Drop me some comments if you have questions or feedback! 🙂

PS. This plugin uses Javascript to interface the Google API. I’d love to rebuild this plugin using PHP so that the links inside of the event descriptions would help each organization’s page rank in Google search. If anyone wants to take a stab at converting this from Javascript to PHP, I’d love you forever!

Have an old version of WordPress that doesn’t support widgets? Not using WordPress at all? Check out this post: Austin Tech Events Widget for those without widgets or WordPress.

Austin Tech Community Events Calendar Strategy

We have a lot of awesome tech and entrepreneurship communities in Austin: door64, Geek Austin, Social Media Club, Bootstrap Austin, Refresh Austin, Jelly, and Startup Drinks, just to name a few. Recently Austin has been doing really well intermingling and cross pollinating our communities, and that has got me EXTREMELY excited. Just the other day Social Media Club had their meeting during Austin Jelly, during that cross mingling Jelly got a few new coworkers and Social Media Club got some new member interest. How cool is that?

One large barrier I’ve found organizing Austin Jelly is the proliferation of calendars online for me to post my events to. And each of those calendars has their own small audience, so of course I need to post to all of them to reach the largest audience. What we need is ONE shared calendar feed with an API so we can display and post events from our organizations website. But the key thing is that the backend is shared, so we’re promoting each others events across the web.

Matt has done a great job developing the community and the calendar at door64.com. One great thing about the door64 calendar (aside from the amount of events posted there and the audience size) is that it’s already integrated into Google Calendars, which is a huge step towards making it easy to spread.

I’d like to help make the door64 calendar THE tech event calendar for Austin. I believe the way to this is by developing the following:

  1. Create WordPress Widget for Austin Tech Events
    (Are you an Austin Tech blogger? Why not promote Austin Tech events by using this widget? PS. It’s almost done, check it out on the bottom of my blog’s sidebar.)
  2. Create automated batch push of Austin events to 3rd party calendars via API
    (AKA: Post an event to door64.com and it gets pushed to these other event calendars.)

    1. Upcoming
    2. Craigslist
    3. What else?
  3. Create an event posting API
    (AKA: Post events to door64’s calendar from your organization’s website. Keep your brand, but cross promote your event.)

What do you think? I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts.

What I've Been Up To

So my last blog post was in November 07! What can I say, I’m a geek not a writer!

Lack of posting excuses aside, since November a lot of great things have been going on. I started Jelly in Austin, a casual coworking group. That has been going great. I’ve met tons of really smart and interesting people at Jelly and I’ve made a lot of friends.

Spawned from the Jelly meetups, me and a few new friends have co-founded a venture that we’ve dubbed Conjunctured. Our goal is to create a company based around coworking and the values found in commons-based peer productions. We’re calling our endeavor a co-company and have started a co-company Google Group to solicit feedback from the community at large. We’re interested in any feedback you may have about the idea, so drop us a line at the Google Group if you get a chance.

I’ve also begun work on some web applications that have been rattling around in my head for awhile. The first being MileTrackr.com. The premise of the site is to leverage Google Maps to calculate your business travel mileage for tax deduction purposes. I imagine the site shining if you don’t log your miles daily, but you keep records of your hours and/or client meetings. You can then use the calendar view on MileTrackr.com to retroactively log your miles, letting Google Maps calculate the distance for you. The site has a lot of work to go, but I’m pleased with the progress I’ve made so far.

Floating Head Studios, the brand I have developed for my personal web services work has been sailing steady. However, I’m considering dividing my branding efforts into 3 segments. Floating Head Studios for the web applications I develop, Conjunctured for technical and marketing services, and Dusty Reagan as an independent consultant. Yeah, I consider “Dusty Reagan” a brand. I’m that guy. 😛

And most recently I’ve upgraded (emphases on the upgrade) my blog from Blogger to WordPress! Woot! Hopefully I’ll have a post about the process up soon. (Aka, within the next 3 months! No, I’m kidding. Hopefully this week.)

Austin Tech Events Calendar

I usually keep up with the geeky technology type events that are going on in Austin. I recently started doing so using Google Calendar, so I thought I’d make my Austin Tech Events calendar public to anyone who is interested.

If you’re signed up with Google Calendar you can add this calendar to your account by subscribing to it.

There’s also a Google hosted page of this calendar here.
And a RSS feed you can subscribe to here.

If you know of an event that I need to add, let me know.

** Update! 3/29/2008 **

Scratch all that!  I’m no longer attempting to keep my own tech events calendar. There’s an awesome tech event calendar at Door64.com. It even comes in Google Calendar flavor, so you can overlay it onto your personal calendar.