A publicly editable Kutcheri Calendar for us!

[rajeshnat]

VijayR
When I entered few days back and started entering the city chennai it just picked up. What I did not see few days back is you have attacked the problem of entering US cities too like I type aust , Immediately Austin,Tx,USA pops up, overall that itself is taking care of lot of problems there .

May be just a little change there Add Toronto,ON,Canada and Ottawa,ON,Canadatoo in the intellisense popups and in the Read filter just include All Cities in USA and Canada instead of saying All cities in US. That is change Request #1

I did not know about this intellisense addition in first place so my previous post is a partial dustbin post . Sorry

[rajeshnat]

I see in the intellisense Sydney,Australia . May be you can add Auckland,NewZealand and add another filter all cities in Australia/Newzealand. That kind of solves Australia-Nz headache.

For Europe, I see you have added London,UK in the intellisense when you create that is good , I guess at this point we can wait(Slovenia had just one and as VK says this can be thought bit later).

[rajeshnat]

The real difficult problem is this , how do I add concerts like this say
TN Seshagopalan , payyannur , Kerala and even if you add how will you display the filter for that . Kerala and tamilnadu has so many hamlets where concerts are held.

Also how do you add say Sudha Ragunathan , Nagpur and how do you display Filter by City dropdown.

I was thinking best way to solve this two problem is make them add in a free format and when the user clicks the link
http://www.kutchericalendar.com/calendar/upcoming.php ,

Instead of showing at as
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Neela Ramgopal (vocal)
Gayathri Venkatraghavan (vocal)
M. S. Gopalakrishnan (award, violin trio)
Jayalakshmi Sekhar - Veena

Show with the @city appended
Neela Ramgopal (vocal)@Bangalore
Gayathri Venkatraghavan (vocal)@MD,USA
M. S. Gopalakrishnan (award, violin trio)@Bangalore
Jayalakshmi Sekhar - Veena@Stuttgart,Germany

That way in one view without individual Mouse hover we will solve this problem of easy read

Also one feature that I have noticed when I do a print you are intelligently appending the present time stamp so that we all know when it was taken.

RVijay , you are coming up with a very well thought out calendar

[VijayR]

@rajeshnat, thanks for the suggestions. Had a busy week at work, so did not get a chance to do much on this front till today. I have added Sri. Suryaprakash and Sri. Maharajapuram Ramachandran in the list of artists suggested while entering events. I have also added a few more cities that are suggested in the autocomplete script.

A simple tokenizer system has now been implemented as part of the search/filter functionality (i.e., the "upcoming" tab) in the calendar. If there is even a single event entry for a particular city in the calendar, then that city will automatically show up in the list of cities to filter by. If the city of your choice does not show up in the list, that means that there are no events in the calendar for that city. As people keep adding events in new cities, the filter list will automatically grow to include these new cities for filtering.

The way this works deep down is that, periodically (once a day), a tokenizer script will run and extract all the cities where events in the calendar are being held. This list will then be stored and used for all subsequent filtering till the list gets updated again on the next run of the tokenizer script. While this mechanism means that the list update process is not instantaneous, I think it is frequent enough to keep most people satisfied.

Feedback is welcome, as always.

[Nick H]

This sounds excellent.

Will it be sensible about mis-spellings, case, etc ?

[VijayR]

This sounds excellent.

Will it be sensible about mis-spellings, case, etc ?

It is a pretty dumb implementation, so cannot correct spelling. Case is much easier to handle. However, the good thing is that the list will quite likely be pretty short, so infrequent manual correction is still a practical solution.

[Nick H]

Good.

I suppose it is time I put my fingers where my mouth is, and when some sabha schedule does come into my hand --- start typing!

[vasanthakokilam]

Vijay: Awesome with the tokenizer implementation. Hope it works out well in practice. We will know soon.

[Nick H]

I am about 1/3rd of the way through adding a schedule we were given yesterday, and have the following thoughts....

At this time of year, particular, many people adding to the calendar will be adding multiple concerts/events.

After adding an event, it would be nice to ...

...Remain in the Add event screen (requires a return-to-calendar-button)
...Keep the previously entered fields, especially the bottom section to minimise repetitive entry (requires a clear-fields button)

I'm sure there are some typos, but I hope I haven't posted any complete nonsense, or got the year wrong, or anything that embarrassing! I've always been somewhat better at administering systems than accurate data entry :$

[VijayR]

I am about 1/3rd of the way through adding a schedule we were given yesterday, and have the following thoughts....

At this time of year, particular, many people adding to the calendar will be adding multiple concerts/events.

After adding an event, it would be nice to ...

...Remain in the Add event screen (requires a return-to-calendar-button)
...Keep the previously entered fields, especially the bottom section to minimise repetitive entry (requires a clear-fields button)

I'm sure there are some typos, but I hope I haven't posted any complete nonsense, or got the year wrong, or anything that embarrassing! I've always been somewhat better at administering systems than accurate data entry :$

Nick: Bravo! You are indeed leading from the front in using this calendar.

The changes you suggest are sensible ones. I will explore further to see if and how they can be implemented. My initial thoughts are that these can be done through the use of a simple browser cookie. Will explore further and get back with some changes... Thanks!

[VijayR]

Vijay: Awesome with the tokenizer implementation. Hope it works out well in practice. We will know soon.

VK: The credit for suggesting the use of such a tokenizer goes to you! Thanks!

[Nick H]

I'm entering the SAFE concert schedule. Their concerts are at 4.30 and 6.30 --- but I'm sure some concerts will have nn.15 and nn.45 stars. I didn't need to, so no idea if one can enter a number direct into that field, otherwise we need those choices in the minutes field.

A great ideal would be to have drop-down lists for accompanists, but I can appreciate that changes in the data structure would not be practical at this point.

[Nick H]

Woops... put "SAFE: Shanthi Arts Foundation & Endowments" throughout ... but they do appear in a different form on your drop-down list.

[VijayR]

I'm beginning to tinker with the calendar again. As one possible design change for the future, please check out the monthly view at the following link:

http://www.kutchericalendar.com/calendar/gcal.php

This is the same monthly view as our calendar, but put into the Google Calendar format instead (to be precise, it is just an embedding of the "All cities" calendar feed that the website sends out to Google Calendar). The rationale for exploring this is that since Google Calendar already does a nice job of the front-end visualization, can we just exploit that for displaying the calendar and focus our efforts on making the data-entry part easier / more convenient? This also makes the process of copying individual events into one's personal Google Calendar much easier (sureshvv has been asking for this feature for a while now).

The main negative of this approach is that since Google Calendar only updates the feed once every few hours (my suspicion is that they do this once every 12 hours), any data entered into the calendar can take up to 12 hours to show up in this view. In contrast, the native monthly view is instant (add an entry and you will see it immediately in the calendar). Also, filtering by city is not possible in this view (but then, it is not present in the native monthly view of our calendar as well).

Any opinions/suggestions on which route we should go would be great!

[Nick H]

please check out the monthly view at the following link

I'm seeing the usual calendar for the monthly view, but no data for day or week?

[VijayR]

I'm seeing the usual calendar for the monthly view, but no data for day or week?

Yes, for now I have only displayed the monthly view using Google Calendar. Week display can be added, but I just wanted to provide a preview for the general idea of using Google Calendar for the visualization and see if people had a preference either way.

[sureshvv]

Idea! Why don't you put up the source code in github or something and announce it here?

[sureshvv]

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.

Works for me:

https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?s ... ssionid=OK

[vainika]

Just in case someone's wondering, Prof SRJ is not lec-demming from 10pm to midnight on Dec 22nd, but in the morning. I couldn't correct the error in the calendar.

[VijayR]

Just noticed that kutcheris.com is also trying to expand out to include events from other cities and countries. Hmm, I wonder what pushed them into this.

[Nick H]

I'm glad they have not just gone into post-season hibernation again.

[rajeshnat]

Just noticed that kutcheris.com is also trying to expand out to include events from other cities and countries. Hmm, I wonder what pushed them into this.

vijayR,
I just saw the link of http://www.kutcheris.com/schedule.php could not see what you have stated .
In general I think yours rocks as you are empowering each of us to add.

Musicians,
Can you all add in the calendar schedule of rVijay(http://www.kutchericalendar.com/calendar/month.php) please . In general bit of advanced planning and selection will be best for every rasika inclusive of me.

[vasanthakokilam]

Just noticed that kutcheris.com is also trying to expand out to include events from other cities and countries. Hmm, I wonder what pushed them into this.

ha..ha..

BTW, This calendar space is now hot with VCs since it has a natural social component. I heard of a company getting quite a few millions for a family activity planning app which is basically calendar based. It will naturally create friends and family social groups. Once you have a calendar, then having to-do lists/shopping lists, family journal etc. become useful services. I guess the equivalent in the carnatic calendar will be song lists and reviews etc.

[VijayR]

ha..ha..

BTW, This calendar space is now hot with VCs since it has a natural social component. I heard of a company getting quite a few millions for a family activity planning app which is basically calendar based. It will naturally create friends and family social groups. Once you have a calendar, then having to-do lists/shopping lists, family journal etc. become useful services. I guess the equivalent in the carnatic calendar will be song lists and reviews etc.

VK, very true... anything with a social component is hot these days. Song-lists and reviews are, as you say, a natural next step in the context of a calendar. Now that I have recovered from the season high, I am starting to tinker with the calendar again...might attempt song-lists next.

Rajeshnat: Thanks. Look in the "Venues" tab to see what I am talking about.

[Nick H]

BTW, This calendar space is now hot with VCs since it has a natural social component. I heard of a company getting quite a few millions for a family activity planning app which is basically calendar based.

On first reading I was getting family activity planning mixed up with family planning activity. :$

I am glad to know that kutcheries.com is trying to be an all-year resource
I am sad to see that VijayR's open calender is an under-used resource.

[vasanthakokilam]

>I am sad to see that VijayR's open calender is an under-used resource.

The reason is, any social thing like this is governed by the well known maxim "buyers go where sellers are, sellers go where the buyers are". ( also known as the market effect or the network effect ). How does such a thing even get started if they are so mutually dependent? It needs some bootstrapping, usually by word of mouth, or in the case of paid services, giving it away for free on a trial basis etc. So, for this calendar to succeed, it has to reach a critical stage where consumers go there expecting it to contain the current data. That will force the publishers to put stuff in. And then it will grow by itself. It is tough problem indeed.