Geek request: an Upcoming-style events widget?
Anyone have any ideas?
Getting more requests for suggestions of shows and exhibitions to see, things to do in the north-east photography-wise, and Yahoo’s Upcoming service as used in the middle bar here, often slows the pageload, and is cumbersome and laborious to enter info. It’s okay if there’s a community of people adding events, but in the north-east, there just isn’t.
One possibility is a list using deli.cio.us links, but does anyone have any better suggestions, maybe a plugin or an easy-to-use feed mashup that doesn’t require writing CSS?
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I don’t like relying on other sites either (other than Flickr for images!).
Upcoming pages have RSS feeds, you could use the Wordpress RSS widget with that feed instead of their embeddable code (same thing works for del.icio.us).
Also, the WP-Cache plugin is well worth a look if you don’t already use it - you can set that up so that people see cached versions of your pages that expire, say, hourly (or a lot longer, it’s entirely configurable). That means that after the first page load where it’s all fetched, subsequent ones all come from your local server cache, so it should be a lot quicker. The cached versions are also static html copies so no scripting runs either, so they’re very fast.
One other thing: I use a Firefox extension called NoScript that denies javascript running on website unless you let them - and you can then add sites you trust and have them remembered as you go along. This just seems safe to me and it also means that you see pages load faster without a lot of stuff enabled (which you can then choose to turn back on if you like).
Anyway, the reason I mention it, is because when I visit here, I see this when I pop-up the activity of NoScript…
You can see that your domain is allowed, but there are a number of other domains running javascript - each of those is potentially something that will take time to run. Some of the ones like FeedBurner are probably that big and fast you won’t notice.
Sometimes this provides an insight in to what’s really going on with web sites.
I find it useful, but I can imagine a lot of people will just think - that looks like a right pain in the harris! :)
D’oh - picture went missing, here it is…
http://davidwild.fastmail.co.uk/misc/brns.png
Dave: wow, thank you for all this. Looks like I need to remove Pollhost as well, although I hadn’t noticed that sticking in the same way as Upcoming.
It might be a good idea to try Upcoming by RSS instead of its widget, but tbh I’d rather get rid altogether. I suppose a delicio.us tag might do it? Not sure how to use the WP RSS widgets. Do I just put the url of the feed in there?
Yeah, I think if you use the RSS widget and just paste in the Upcoming.org feed, it should format the events in a list that will pick up your theme’s style.