A publicly editable Kutcheri Calendar for us!

VijayR · Post by **VijayR** » 16 Oct 2011, 04:37

Dear Fellow Rasikas,

The event calendar on our forum has not been working for a while now. To serve the need of our community for an event calendar, I present to you the Kutcheri Calendar.

http://www.kutchericalendar.com

What is it?

Kutcheri Calendar is a calendar that lists Carnatic music performances (i.e., kutcheris) and related events around the world.

Why? How is it different?

While there are other excellent (and more feature rich) carnatic music calendars, they are all centrally administered in the sense that only one person (the website administrator) populates the calendar with event information. Most people will agree that carnatic music is now truly global with performances taking place in a large number of cities and countries (as a reflection of this, our forum is truly global too!). In such a scenario, the single-administrator model simply does not scale.

In contrast, Kutcheri Calendar is intended to be a "community maintained" calendar that taps into the collective knowledge and manpower of the global rasika community for maintaining the calendar (sort of like Wikipedia). In accordance with this philosophy, the main feature of Kutcheri Calendar is that any rasika can directly add a new event to the calendar, just like he/she would add an event to their own personal calendar. The main difference is that this is a shared community calendar. The added event will immediately show up in the calendar - no emails to send, no delays.

Regardless of whether you are a performing artist, music sabha secretary, student, or listener, this is intended to be your calendar. If you know of a kutcheri taking place in your city (or any city, for that matter), please feel free to enter it as an event in the calendar. Please read the Help/FAQ before you add events and follow the conventions listed there, for the sake of consistency.

I hope this serves our forum as a useful resource, especially with the music season fast approaching. Your comments and feedback are welcome!

Regards,
VijayR

appu · Post by **appu** » 16 Oct 2011, 04:50

Vijay,

Looks very nice and user friendly in nature. Easy to navigate and a great help to Rasikas all over during the season. Nice job. Keep it up.

Appu

S.NAGESWARAN · Post by **S.NAGESWARAN** » 16 Oct 2011, 11:10

Vijay,

Thank you for coming up the katcherI event calandar.

It is easy to fill up the details by any Rasika and easy to view the event programmes.

S.NAGESWARAN.
16.10.2011.

sureshvv · Post by **sureshvv** » 16 Oct 2011, 14:33

can i copy an event to my gmail calendar easily?

Nick H · Post by **Nick H** » 16 Oct 2011, 17:10

A quibble...

"You will be redirected ... momentarily"

You mean in a moment or presently. Momentarily means for a moment. I think there is a joke about some pilot announcing that the plane would be flying momentarily

Nitpicking (nick-picking) over ...

It is a beautiful piece of work. Simple, clear layout for each option. Does it cope well with the busy festival times of many entries per day?

VijayR · Post by **VijayR** » 16 Oct 2011, 19:33

Thanks!

@Nick: I am ambivalent, but point well taken...

Although http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/momentarily lists multiple definitions for the word (including "at any moment" and "imminently"), the more common use of the word is indeed "for a moment". I will modify the wording.

Whether it scales well as the amount of traffic and number of events increase remains to be seen (I am confident that it will, based on everything I have read about the underlying software infrastructure). The web host that I am hosting the page on is also new to me, but has received pretty good reviews as far as bandwidth and uptime goes. Let us wait and see.

@sureshvv: I know that there is some mechanism to allow remote subscriptions, so that you can subscribe to this calendar through Google Calendar, iCal or your favorite calendar application. I'll look into it some more.

Nick H · Post by **Nick H** » 16 Oct 2011, 19:57

Thanks for putting up with my nick-picking

It's a great work. Let us hope that people contribute their events to it.

vainika · Post by **vainika** » 16 Oct 2011, 22:27

Nice work - thanks! Anticipating this will be widely adopted, is there likely to be any way (in the future) to sort listings by city, or have multiple calendars e.g. http://bengaluru.kutchericalendar.com, http://chennai.kutchericalendar.com?

Nick H · Post by **Nick H** » 16 Oct 2011, 22:52

I use Lightning --- the Thunderbird addon. Given that I need the lightest and simplest [only] calender, as I have very few things to keep track of, it is fine for me. However, I don't think anybody else in the world likes it enough to develop anything to communicate with it. Even Mozilla are tardy about updating to work with the latest versions of Thunderbird, so I have to be wary of upgrades.

tkb · Post by **tkb** » 16 Oct 2011, 23:28

Congrats @VijayR. very nice one and informative too.

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 16 Oct 2011, 23:39

Vijay, excellent work. Thanks.

If you are using a hosted calender service, do they have a generic iPhone or Android app for this? Or this is all built from ground up by you?

Sam Swaminathan · Post by **Sam Swaminathan** » 17 Oct 2011, 05:21

Vijay

Excellent and extremely useful. If I may suggest, a drop down box for cities could be helpful to focus on that particular city only. I think "vainika" is suggesting the same, I assume. Regards

VijayR · Post by **VijayR** » 17 Oct 2011, 18:17

Thank you all for your kind words.

@vasanthakokilam: I am not using a hosted calendar service. So, there is no dedicated iPhone or Android app. However, I will (over the next few days) provide:

(a) An iCal feed that anyone can subscribe to from their own calendar client. Lightning, iCal, Google Calendar, and most other calendar clients (even smartphone clients) allow you to subscribe to an external calendar using a URL. So, the events from the Kutcheri Calendar will show up in your personal calendar. This will hopefully address what sureshvv and Nick mentioned.

(b) An RSS feed that you can bookmark in your browsers or RSS clients. This will be an automatically updated feed of events.

(c) A dedicated page on the main webpage that lists upcoming events in the form of a list. I will see if I can implement city-based filtering in this.

From what I understand of the software, implementing a "filtering by city" in the full calendar is non-trivial. I might decide to attempt it, but will take some time.

Nick H · Post by **Nick H** » 17 Oct 2011, 21:39

Woa... this is very good stuff

(just a not of ongoing encouragement

)

Radhika-Rajnarayan · Post by **Radhika-Rajnarayan** » 18 Oct 2011, 09:47

I have made an entry for 23rd Oct
http://www.kutchericalendar.com/calenda ... e=20111023
All are welcome!

Radhika-Rajnarayan · Post by **Radhika-Rajnarayan** » 18 Oct 2011, 09:49

Works well for viewers as well as people posting entries. Well organised, easy to use, great work. Thank you!

Ranganayaki · Post by **Ranganayaki** » 18 Oct 2011, 23:47

I didn't try it out, but I was wondering if this allows us to enter two events for the same time on the same date, or is it on a first-come basis? It is worldwide and we can have a multiple events for a certain date at a single time of day.

Thank you so much, VijayR, for fulfilling a huge need with this effort.

VijayR · Post by **VijayR** » 19 Oct 2011, 02:04

Ranganayaki,

Yes, multiple events for the same time and date are certainly allowed!

mohan · Post by **mohan** » 19 Oct 2011, 04:30

Thanks for your efforts in getting this up and running Vijay!

I wonder if it is possible for you to automatically colour code the entries by city. You can't have a colour for every city but I envisage different colours for Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, other cities in India, then colours for other countries such as USA, Australia, UK, then other countries.

Also a filter feature where we can filter the entries by town/city/country or sabha. I can imagine during the music season there are going to be perhaps 30 on a single day (various times)!

VijayR · Post by **VijayR** » 19 Oct 2011, 04:55

All,

I have added a new tab, titled "Upcoming", to the webpage. You can use this tab to get a list of upcoming events. The list of upcoming events can be filtered based on city (the list of cities is rather short now, but I will expand it) as well as the time period you are interested in (from 1 week into the future to 4 weeks into the future).

Mohan: Good suggestions... The filtering by city above partially addresses your post. I will see if I can introduce filtering and/or color coding in the main calendar itself.

Regards,
VijayR

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 19 Oct 2011, 05:15

BTW, please do not go overboard on the coloring thing as Google Calendar does. Definitely, preferences on this varies from person to person. To my eyes, if there are too many colors in a page, it is just so jarring that it takes focus away from the contents.

sureshvv · Post by **sureshvv** » 19 Oct 2011, 10:58

How about indicating if it is ticketed vs. all are welcome type?

VijayR · Post by **VijayR** » 26 Oct 2011, 05:44

Hello,

A couple of people asked if you could add / subscribe to the Kutcheri Calendar (http://www.kutchericalendar.com) so that you can view it with all your other calendars. I just added this functionality in the calendar. There is a new button (tab) titled "Subscribe" on the menubar at the top of the webpage. Using the instructions given there, you can add / subscribe to event feeds using your own favorite calendar client such as Apple's iCal, Google Calendar, Mozilla's Lightning, etc. There are currently three calendars that are provided as feeds:

All: This calendar contains all the events in the Kutcheri Calendar
Chennai: This calendar contains all the events in the Kutcheri Calendar happening in Chennai
Bangalore: This calendar contains all the events in the Kutcheri Calendar happening in Bangalore

Feedback is, as always, welcome!

Finally, a special feature for all the Facebook addicts; there is a Facebook "Like" button on the top right of the webpage.

Wishing everyone a wonderful Deepavali,
VijayR

Nick H · Post by **Nick H** » 26 Oct 2011, 14:12

Excellent. I quickly and easily created the calendar in Mozilla Lightning.

The documentation is good too. Love the diagram, with its carnatic crowds accessing! The whole project is very polished and professional ... a heartfelt thankyou

Ponbhairavi · Post by **Ponbhairavi** » 26 Oct 2011, 15:40

This is an extremely useful service for music. artists not so famous get an opportunity to be included in the programme schedule and seen by music enthusiasts all over particularly for moffussil cities like pondicherry
where no local newspaper publishes programmes of cultural and artistic events mentioning the name of the artists. I have included Bhairavi's this month's programme and this site will be announced during the concert so that the public can be in the look out. rajagopalan

rajeshnat · Post by **rajeshnat** » 26 Oct 2011, 18:39

VijayR
Bit late to wish your wonderful service. The calendar here was not usually updated.there was a calendar that was during Dec season that was prepared that did not empower everyone to add. Now you have addded a truly wonderful calendar that will go a long way in people knowing in advance and planning to attend concerts not just in chennai but throughout the world . The filter of cities is very good , if there is a way to bring more filters like SE Asia, Australasia(Aus and Nz), Western India (Guj, Maharashtra) and North India and bring more filters like Madurai/Trinelveli. The day is not far off when some way reads your calendar in a not well known hamlet in kerala where concerts are held for 4 to 5 hours and the rasika says I got this info from your calendar.

srkris · Post by **srkris** » 26 Oct 2011, 22:56

Hi everyone, since Sri Vijay has invested his time and efforts to develop a user friendly calendar that has gained acceptance from some of us who have had the chance to review it, I requested him to consider making it the default calendar for our members and the public at large. He has conveyed his willingness for his calendar to be linked as the 'default' events calendar for rasikas.org

In this process, we will need to close down our existing calendar functionality. What is your opinion on the proposed change outlined above?

Nick H · Post by **Nick H** » 27 Oct 2011, 01:29

Agreed.

The other side to Vijay's creativity and professionalism is that it will also come to naught if it is not used. It would be nice if some of the organisers became aware of it and started making use of it.

srkris · Post by **srkris** » 27 Oct 2011, 03:19

Thanks Nick. The calendar link that appears on the main page now points to Vijay's calendar.

Nick H · Post by **Nick H** » 06 Nov 2011, 02:33

Sadly, it seems to have petered (is that the right word?) out.

If anybody is in a position to bring this to the attention of artists and sabbhas... please?

sureshvv · Post by **sureshvv** » 06 Nov 2011, 08:22

can we keep the original rasikas.org calendar going for a while longer?

rajeshnat · Post by **rajeshnat** » 06 Nov 2011, 10:39

sureshvv wrote:can we keep the original rasikas.org calendar going for a while longer?

Is there a specific reason why you ask , this rvijay calendar has more features?

sureshvv · Post by **sureshvv** » 07 Nov 2011, 02:03

It is easy to copy events in and out of the old rasikas calendar to one's personal gmail calendar. The new Kucheri Calendar does not do this yet AFAICT.

VijayR · Post by **VijayR** » 07 Nov 2011, 02:20

@sureshvv,

I thought the old rasikas.org event calendar was not working (it always reported a "page not found" when I clicked on it)!!

Providing an "add to Google calendar" button should be simple to do and I will put this feature in. I just thought that the feature for subscribing to the calendar through Google subsumes this (in the sense that once you subscribe to the Kutcheri Calendar in Google, you can copy any event into your personal calendar). If adding individual events is a particularly useful feature, I can put that functionality in.

sureshvv wrote:It is easy to copy events in and out of the old rasikas calendar to one's personal gmail calendar. The new Kucheri Calendar does not do this yet AFAICT.

sureshvv · Post by **sureshvv** » 07 Nov 2011, 10:15

VijayR wrote: I thought the old rasikas.org event calendar was not working (it always reported a "page not found" when I clicked on it)!!

It works pretty well. One main drawback there is there is no fine grained access rights. So an event I created could be deleted by
another rasikas user.

Providing an "add to Google calendar" button should be simple to do and I will put this feature in.

Great! That me make the old rasikas calendar obsolete.

rajeshnat · Post by **rajeshnat** » 07 Nov 2011, 15:37

sureshvv wrote:One main drawback there is there is no fine grained access rights. So an event I created could be deleted by
another rasikas user.

SureshVV
I just tried the calendar now by typing one of today's concert entry that I saw in The hindu paper , Once saved I am unable to delete so where do you see the delete option , bit escapes me. If it is indeed there it is bit suicidal.

RVijay
I see you popup the list of artists when one adds entry, that is a great feature , as names are organized in a standard fashion , I see atleast two names missing Maharajapuram Ramachandran (Vocal) and R Suryaprakash (vocal), can you add them too.

Also add more city filters as indicated in my previous post (#26)in this thread. Acknowledge when you are done with adding names and adding more city filters. You are doing a great job

Ranganayaki · Post by **Ranganayaki** » 07 Nov 2011, 18:45

Rajeshnat, I think the delete option referred to a drawback in the old calendar. I think the old calendar's main drawback is it cannot be accessed at all by a number of us, as VijayR said. I get the page not found msg too.

rajeshnat · Post by **rajeshnat** » 07 Nov 2011, 19:01

RanganAyaki
You are right , the delete option drawback is in the old calendar . As such everything is good with RVijay's calendar

Rvijay
Add the two vidwans names and bring more city filters as indicated before.

Sam Swaminathan · Post by **Sam Swaminathan** » 08 Nov 2011, 01:43

Vijay...the calender is very good and user friendly. Invariably, I go to the calender from the forum which I read daily. I get redirected to the calender. Currently, once I have finished reading the calender I need step back (any number of times) to go back to Rasikas to continue my reading the Rasika site. Is it possible to provide a link in the calender, some thing like (go back to Rasikas) so that with one click we can be re-directed back to the rasika's site? Thank you for your consideration of this request. Regards

VijayR · Post by **VijayR** » 08 Nov 2011, 01:53

Sam Swaminathan wrote:Vijay...the calender is very good and user friendly. Invariably, I go to the calender from the forum which I read daily. I get redirected to the calender. Currently, once I have finished reading the calender I need step back (any number of times) to go back to Rasikas to continue my reading the Rasika site. Is it possible to provide a link in the calender, some thing like (go back to Rasikas) so that with one click we can be re-directed back to the rasika's site? Thank you for your consideration of this request. Regards

Sam, thanks for the kind words. I can do this, but a cleaner solution might be to have the link open up in a new window leaving the original window intact on rasikas.org. Once you are done with the calendar, you can just close that window and get back to browsing the forum.

@srkris: when you get a chance, could you please add a [target="_blank"] to the event calendar link on our forum so that the calendar opens in a new window when the link is clicked? I am, of course, presuming that phpBB allows you to specify this option.

@rajeshnat: Thanks, will add the additional vidwan names and city filters soon and confirm.

Thanks,
VijayR

Ranganayaki · Post by **Ranganayaki** » 08 Nov 2011, 02:21

Vijay, just checked the USA filter, and it doesn't bring up this Sunday's concert in Maryland by Gayatri Venkataraghavan, which does figure in the calendar.

VijayR · Post by **VijayR** » 08 Nov 2011, 02:58

Ranganayaki wrote:Vijay, just checked the USA filter, and it doesn't bring up this Sunday's concert in Maryland by Gayatri Venkataraghavan, which does figure in the calendar.

Aaah, Murphy's Law!!! The one bug that I know exists has to be hit before I fix it.

I know what the issue is... the search code in the city filters is case sensitive. So, I am searching for "usa" while the entry has "USA". This should be a quick fix... will do it once I get home this evening.

EDIT: The fix turned out to be even simpler than I thought. It is fixed now.

rajeshnat · Post by **rajeshnat** » 08 Nov 2011, 12:40

Some thoughts on Filters

Chennai
Coimbatore/Erode/Tirupur
Trichy/Madurai
Rest of TamilNadu and Pondichery
---------
Bangalore
Rest of Karnataka
------------
AndhraPradesh
Kerala
--------------
Mumbai/Thane/Kalyan
Rest of MaharAshtra
-----------------
Delhi
Kolkata
-------------
Rest of India
--------------
South East Asia(Singapore and Malaysia)
--------------
Europe
Australia and NewZealand
-------------
US -EST Time Zone
US- CST Time Zone
US- MST Time Zone
US- PST Time Zone
Canada
-----------
Rest of World

Note :
# I feel segmenting as Hyderabad and Rest of Andhrapradesh is not necessary, one AndhraPradesh will do(no political insight there)
# Kerala is a tricky state as the rural spread is quite high and there are more concerts in fairly unknown villages.
# I thought spreading the timezones in US is good move ,as there are going to be lot of concerts in US as we move forward . I am also fine with one USA instead of four zone split of USA
# We have Rest of World that includes Surinam , Greenland , Antarctica and Burkina Faso
# The key for you is to have it in the same order with a seperation of -------- so that people get used to.

srikant1987 · Post by **srikant1987** » 08 Nov 2011, 14:12

I feel it may make sense to give Mysore a special place instead of clubbing it with non-Bangalore Karnataka.

I also have a hunch Pune may be having a substantial number of HM concerts too. Hopefully soon it will also see quite some CM soon.

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 08 Nov 2011, 21:21

A few things about filters...

1) Start with something reasonable and change if necessary based on feedback . Do not overdo it at the start. You will also get a pretty good idea on the density of concerts wrt to places after it is in operation for some time.

2) Keep these filters strictly for viewers. Those who enter should not have to be bothered by the read filter. But capture as much data as possible. Most importantly, do not ask them to enter data explicitly so the filter works. For example, if you have region as a filter, do not ask them to enter a region, like Rest of Andhrapradesh. Let them enter the city and you figure out that it belongs to 'Rest of Andhra Pradesh'. This way, you can redesign the read filters later on using the same data.

Sam Swaminathan · Post by **Sam Swaminathan** » 09 Nov 2011, 00:55

Thank you Vijay...Regards

VijayR · Post by **VijayR** » 09 Nov 2011, 01:06

Rajeshnat and Vasanthakokilam: Thanks for your thoughts on the filters.

Let me share a few more details on how the filtering is currently implemented. The only information used in the filtering is the "City" field, which is entered by whoever creates the event in the calendar. While listing events, the filtering code simply checks if the city entry for an event matches (or more generally, contains as a subset) a given value (e.g., Chennai, Bangalore, etc). Only the events that pass this check are displayed.

In such a (string matching based) filtering system, given any text (say XYZ, where XYZ can be any string of letters), it is easy to display all events where the city field for the event contains XYZ. However, it is very difficult to implement a filter of the form "Rest of XYZ" (where XYZ can be a state, country, or other region).

For example, for implementing "Rest of Tamil Nadu", I would first need an exhaustive list of cities in Tamil Nadu (this is impractical, even more so since things like alternative spellings or typos need to be accounted for). Even if I somehow had such an exhaustive list, the search process for each event would become very inefficient. In a naive implementation, I would have to compare the city field of this event to every city in Tamil Nadu to determine if the event should be displayed or not (Translation: sloooooowww website).

Now, if the person creating the entry were to create the city field as "Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India", then it is easy to filter "Rest of Tamil Nadu" by saying that the city field should contain "Tamil Nadu", but should not contain "Chennai". However, I agree with VK that it is a bad design choice to assume that people entering events will voluntarily stick to this format. The only reasonable relaxation of this would be the assumption that if the concert is held in a country other than India, users are very likely to enter the country as part of the city field (e.g., "Frankfurt, Germany" or "Chicago, USA"). In that case, it is easy to filter "All cities in the USA" by simply searching for "USA" in the city field.

In light of all this, the only filters that are currently practical to implement are of the form: Display only the events where the city field contains the given search text. The alternative is for me to change the event entry form to add two additional fields "State" and "Country", which will then make filtering by these easy.

Apologies for the long-winded explanation!

srkris · Post by **srkris** » 09 Nov 2011, 02:47

I think I will need to modify the template to place the target blank code in. Wont be able to try that before the weekend.

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 09 Nov 2011, 04:05

VijayR, Thanks for the explanation. Longer the better for these things. What you have got now is great and it will be immense use right away.

One idea for future enhancement is to use the 'most dumb' unstructured implementation which can make it look very smart on the read filter side.

Let people enter in free form the location, sabha, city etc. Grab all of them, token-ize them into words, throw away some common 'uninteresting' ones ( like 'in', 'at' etc. ), sort them and offer that as the filter list. Whatever they pick, then display all the events with that token in that field. So, the filter is basically a search term and pull down menu is basically giving the user a pre-filled list of words to search on, in this case a list of places. Initially, it will be a bit awkward for the users but over time the list of places will stabilize and you can tweak the UI to be more user-friendly. Like put up a alphabet list so they can narrow down the list of words starting with that letter of the alphabet etc.

What this will do is, people can search by city or place name ( chennai, madras, nanganallur etc. ) or sabha name or state or country. You will have to put a disclaimer that it is Garbage In Garbage Out

If it gets to be too much junk, you can do some minimal things on the input UI side to guide the user to enter things in a logical sequence.

Not sure how implementable it is with the infrastructure you have there, so take it just as a suggestion for further brainstorming.

VijayR · Post by **VijayR** » 09 Nov 2011, 04:17

vasanthakokilam wrote:VijayR, Thanks for the explanation. Longer the better for these things.

One idea is to use the 'most dumb' unstructured implementation but make it look very smart on the read filter side. Let people enter in free form the location, sabha, city etc. Grab all of them, tokenize them into words, throw away some common 'uninteresting' ones ( like 'in', 'at' etc. ), sort them and offer that as the filter list. Whatever they pick, then display all the events with that token in that field. Not sure how implementable it is, so it is just a suggestion.

VK: Interesting idea! A simple version of this might be (relatively easily) implementable. For starters, I can just use a script to periodically read the entire database of entries and smart-tokenize the "City" field as you suggest and produce an output file of tokens. The PHP/HTML can just read the token file for providing the filters. As people enter more/new cities, subsequent runs of the tokenizer script will automatically include those tokens into the filter set! Hmmm....