With 2014 only a couple of days away, Essex Ham has just launched a new Events Calendar. Our old Essex Ham Events Calendar has been looking a little tired of late, and we’ve been testing a new calendar service for a couple of weeks now. We think it’s ready to roll out, and we’ll be using this as our new Events service for 2014.
What’s new?
- Multiple views – Month, List and Posterboard (as shown in the picture)
- Event filtering – Decide what you want on the calendar – club nights, field days, training
- Club filtering – Just want to see what one Essex club is up to? It’s easy
- Colour-coded – to see what type of events are coming up
- Improved Sidebar Widget – Better summary information
- Comment on events – Logged-in members can comment on any past or present event
- Maps – Each event listing now has a Google map
- Sharing – Want a list of Essex events on your smartphone, Outlook Calendar or Google account? No problem
- Member updates – Members can be given access to add new events (handy for club secretaries looking to promote events in Essex!)
The new Calendar
It’s now live, and it’s been loaded with the next three months worth of club events. You’ll find it here: Essex Ham Events Calendar, but we can now add it to any page we want.
Essex Ham Events Feed
At the bottom of the calendar, you’ll see two buttons for sharing – one is to let you subscribe to our feed in your Google Calendar (free to Google users), and the other is for an iCal feed – which can be read by most calendar applications, including Microsoft Outlook, and the iOS and Android calendar applications – so you can add a feed of upcoming Essex amateur radio events direct to your computer or your smartphone. Here’s the feed updated automatically on the iPhone 4S built-in calendar:
We hope you enjoy the all-new events calendar. If you have any comments, please add them in the box below.
Brilliant idea, this. I did struggle a bit as I recently found that Google had (again) tweaked the API on their calendar which has stopped Thunderbird (my e-mail client) and Lightning (the calendar plugin) from talking to Google. My phone/web calendar was still functioning but no amount of re-setting the URL would work.
However, it seemed to come alive after the 4th attempt so I’ve now got my normal Google Calendar with the Essex Ham Events also displaying using the iCal URL which Lightning accepts directly. With each “calendar” showing in a different colour, I can easily see what’s mine and what is “Essex Ham” – anything I want sync’d into my Google one I can just edit and change it.
With that arrangement, all the yearly “clutter” is visible on my desktop but only my events of interest are pushed to Google. I had originally “subscribed” to this via Google but found the 2 separate feeds better for me.
I’ve probably made it sound more complicated than it really is :)
Cheers Charlie. Glad to hear it’s useful. Seems to integrate well into Outlook and on the iPhone, but Google Calendar needed some tweaking. Hopefully this will be a useful service, especially if the local clubs get in the habit of pushing info over to me to add to the list.
It’s working well now that I’ve got my Google stuff back. The down-side of doing it this way is that once I “move” an Event from EssexHam to Google, it re-appears as “EssexHam” after a re-sync. So I get 2 identical events (albeit a different colour) on my desktop. That’s most likely a side-effect of subscribing to an external feed – whatever comes down from your end takes priority over my local edits.
*sniggers* Must remember to add some contests to my calendar…