NPR Digital Services Blog

It’s important to have the most up-to-date venue information available in your Public Events calendar.

The venue and presenting-organization list on the “submit event” form displays as an alphabetized pop-up window. This makes it a snap to view venues and organizations in the database and Select them for an event.

If venue contact information changes, you can easily update that once, and it’s updated across your calendar. We also recommend that you perform a little “spring cleaning” and check this list periodically to delete venue duplications.

• Go to: http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/xxxx/events.eventsadmin (substitute your station for the ‘xxxx’) and Click “Search/edit existing venues”.
• Search all or search for particular venues to update.
• From this venue page you can Clickon the name of the venue to get to the upcoming events at that venue.
• Click on the venue name to make changes to any venue information.

Short notice, but we’re going to do some Public Events Calendar Training tomorrow.

Tuesday, April 26
3 PM ET

Contact me if you’re interested in joining in.

Your station can easily customize your event category names, delete categories and add your own custom categories to your Public Events Calendar. Just log onto your Events admin tools:

• To add: Click “Insert a Category,” type the new category name, click Preview and Save.
• To edit: Click “Search/Edit Categories,” then click on the name of the category. After the small window pops up, edit the name, click Preview and Save.
• To delete: Click “Search/Edit Categories,” then check off the box and click the “Delete Checked” button at the bottom of the page.

NOTE: You cannot delete a category that currently contains events. You must first edit those events and change their category or delete them.

Public Events main page (events.eventsmain) event display order depends on whether event is a recurring event or a one time event. If both were treated the same, a long running recurring event such as a museum exhibit would stay on top of the page for several months. Not so useful.

Events are listed in this order:

• One time events taking place today + 4 days, and recurring events that begin and end during that time frame. Ordered by start date.
• Events that start between today + 4 days, and end greater than +4 days. Ordered by start date.
• Events that start and end beyond today + 4 days. There are ordered first by start date, and then reordered by end date.  If it ordered by start date, any long term events would always be there until they expire because they’d have the earliest start dates. Ordering by end date makes sure the ones that are ending soon show up. Otherwise, you’d never see them because the ones with early start dates would always be listed first.

We’re doing some Public Events calendar training via the web this Friday. Not quite a full blown webinar, but could be fun. Let me know if you’re interested in joining in.

Date: Friday, March 4, 2011
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST

We’ll focus on reviewing how to enter and edit events, feature events, and set up your events widget. If you have specific questions, please share them with us ahead of time. And yes, it’s free to our clients.

You can easily export past, pending or current event information from your calendar. Generate a list to read on air, export information to use in your print publications,or export event history for your files.

From your Events Admin page, click Export Events.

• Set the desired date range and other search criteria.
• For File Type: Choose Compact (event info shown in a compact, easy to read format) for reading on air, Verbose (blocks like a card catalog for easy scanning) or tab delimited (for use in Excel).
• Then check and uncheck the fields you would like to export (you may wish to select all).
• Click ‘Search’.
• You’ll see a link at the top of the page. Click on this link and print from your browser, copy and paste into another program or right-click and the save file for use in Excel.

Want to spice up the look of your Public Events main page and draw attention to certain events?

Feature an event! This brings an event to the very top of your calendar regardless of its date or category, and will slowly scroll through all the featured events.

It’s easy to schedule featured events, just define dates when you want the event featured. To make the page even more appealing try adding graphics to the events you feature. For examples, see KWMU and KPLU.

To feature events, log into your Events admin:

• Click ‘Feature events on your Public Events home page’.
• Search for the event you would like to feature, and click the Schedule button.
• Set the date range and order accordingly.
• You can feature up to 10 events at a time.

A friendly reminder that you can easily feed upcoming event information from your Public Events Calendar to your station home page (or side rail, or footer, or other page) in two ways:

Easier: JavaScript Widget
Just cut and paste the JavaScript code once, and event information will update automatically.

Events RSS feeds and the RSS Wizard:
Share and display more specific event information through the RSS feeds. You can adjust your RSS feed to highlight events from specific dates or categories. Then, use the RSS Wizard to further format the feed.

For detailed instructions, see:
Public Events: Events Calendar Widget and RSS Feed

Any user can enter an event when they visit your events calendar. For venues that enter events frequently, consider setting up a limited access account for them. This allows them to enter and edit their event info more quickly.

To increase efficiency and reduce your data entry, consider creating separate user accounts for local arts organizations to access your Public Events calendar.

Simply create a username and password for each organization, and choose level of access. When they log in to Events Admin, they’ll be able to enter and edit new event information, minimizing your data entry, particularly making edits to events.

• You decide if you want their events data to post to a pending area for your review, or go live automatically.
• You control the passwords and level of access.
• They can enter and edit their event info.

What’s going on this weekend? A reminder that you can easily feed event information to your station home page to let people know about upcoming events in two ways:

Easier: Javascript Widget
Just cut and paste once and event information will update automatically. Choose featured, by category or by date.

RSS feeds and the RSS Wizard:
Share and display event information through RSS feeds. You can adjust your RSS feed to highlight events from specific dates or categories. Then, use the RSS Wizard to format the feed and style the appearance via CSS.

For instructions:
Log in to your Public Events Admin, scroll to the bottom of the page, click “Events Calendar Widget and RSS Feed”

Example:
MPR Minnesota