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Site Tweak: A Calendar
10 November 2015
We receive a lot of interesting news releases about gallery and museum openings around the country. We'd like to publish them because the work they point out always give us something to think about. But we've never really had a smart way of passing them along to you. Until now.
The problem with simply publishing the news release is retrieving it. A show may go for a month or even half a year. You may remember hearing about it not exactly when you heard about it.
It really cries out for a list. Or in this case, a calendar of gallery and museum openings. Although once you build a calendar there's really no need to restrict it to just those events.
So that's what we've done. Take a look.
MENUS
You'll find a link to the Calendar in our fly-out Jump menu on our main pages and also at the top of those main pages, along with our Archive, Classic Books and Best Products links.
We resized those links a little so everything still fits.
The page itself has an "updated" timestamp to let you know when the data itself (not the page) was last updated. Unlike the timestamp on our main headlines page, it includes the date (in color) because we don't expect to update the listings daily, as we do with news items on the main headlines page.
We thought of building a data entry form to add events but it turns out it's much simpler to just use Keyboard Maestro to drop the XML schema into the XML data file and drag and drop the data from an email or Web page into the empty fields.
FIELDS
The Exhibit name links either directly to the exhibit's page or to the hosting institution's site. That should minimize dead links.
Opening and Closing dates are formatted as
CCYY-MM-DDso they sort properly and can be compared against today's date. The default sort is simply by ascending Closing date so you see what's closing first. City|State sorts by either city name or state name with cities sorted within each state.You can sort by Description too, but we were up late last night trying to think of a reason why you would.
SORTING
To Sort the list, just click on the heading name. To reverse the sort click on it again. Simple.
Sorting is useful for grouping Locations together. If you're going to be in San Francisco, you can see all the San Francisco shows grouped together.
Sorting can also be useful for checking dates. You can quickly find out what's closing soon (which is how things appear when the page loads) or what will be around a while.
Sorting is even more useful if you filter the data using any of the three filter buttons on top.
FILTERING
The Current filter shows only exhibits that are currently open. That skips any closed shows and any upcoming shows.
The Coming filter shows any shows in the list that are not yet open. For you trend setters.
And the Closed filter shows those shows that have recently closed. There aren't any at the moment. And we don't plan to make this a historical listing. Entries will age out at some point. And this filter will make it easy for us to find them.
So if you want to see current exhibitions in Los Angeles, say, you would click on Current and sort on City, then scroll down (or use your Browser's Find command) to Los Angeles (or click on City again to reverse the sort).
ENTRIES
One of the requirements for this feature was it had to be simple for us to add new events. Or, you know, we wouldn't. And what use is a calendar that isn't updated?
We thought of building a data entry form to add events but it turns out it's much simpler to just use Keyboard Maestro to drop the XML schema into the XML data file and drag and drop the data from an email or Web page into the empty fields.
With one keystroke we create a new record and a few mouse moves later we have a complete entry.
CONTRIBUTE
If you'd like us to list something, just email us the news release or a link to the event's page and we'll rub our chin a few seconds while we consider it. You can use the feedback button below or any of the email links sprinkled around the site. (There's one in every footer.)
Couldn't be easier.
But if you think it could be more useful, you know where to find us.