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I'll try to be succinct: I'm hoping to set up a Web site to database and track local events. I live in a smallish city (140k people) with about another 50k people in towns with a 45-minute drive, and there are a LOT of cultural and social activities going on, from school dinners to church bazaars to small concerts to university theatre productions to Girl Guide cookie sales. But there's no central repository that really lists everything – partly because there's so much that goes on, partly because this is Quebec and the French/English divide really becomes apparent in some listing services.
I have webspace and registering a name is not a problem.
Time, however, is a bit of a problem, so I'd like to set up something that's easy for other people to maintain.
What I have in mind is this: some sort of database that can be updated either dynamically by registered users, or that uses a comma-delineated format that allows people to send me e-mails (a lot of people aren't so computer-savvy, so e-mail might be friendlier) .
Ideally, I'd work to set the thing up, then find representatives of various micro-communities to register as users who can then add their own events, and use my energy to aggressively try to get “regular” people, both French and English, to check the listings and submit events to be listed (I wouldn't want an open system, because I want some controls over what's being listed, spam control, etc.) so I can include them.
My l33t w3b skillz are limited to HTML, however. Databases are thoroughly beyond me.
In my mind, what I see is a kind of table that looks like this:
EVENT; CATEGORY; Date; Time; Location; Unique or Recurring; Fundraiser Y/N; Cost Advance; Cost Door; Organizer/Organization; Contact Phone; Contact E-mail.
CATEGORY would be one of the following: Culture; Music; Food; Shopping; Art; Theatre.
CATEGORY would also trigger a colour code so that things appear in colour according to their broad category. Unique events (one night only) would appear in “full colour,” and Recurring events would appear as a greyer shade of the same colour. First/last nights of recurring events would be “unique.”
If this were set up with Web-based entry, it'd be great to include a button that lets people copy the last event to make a long list of the same event for recurring things, like when the Red Cross goes on a three-week door-to-door ribbon campaign or something. If it were comma-delineated, you could just cut and paste your event.
The ideas are first to help people find out what's going on in a culturally dynamic but geographically broad area, and also to help event planners know what else is going on when they plan an event. You don't want to plan your big school spaghetti supper and bake sale on the same night as two churches and the local gardening club if you can avoid it.
SUPER ideally, this system, once it's working here, would be bundled and offered to any community that wants to use it for free: just get an appropriate domain name and some hosting, load it in, and start your own community event tracking site.
I have the Web space, and I'm willing to front the cash for the domain registration. But I can't program for crap. So I'm posting this here (and copying it to a few good friends) that are more Internet-savvy than I am, in the hopes that they might be able to point me towards some appropriate tools. And to see if anyone has any helpful suggestions or can see any glaring holes in this plan.
Things like Eventful are, frankly, too big and too cluttery. I found an interesting attempt at something here, but I'd like something that looks – well, a lot more like Barbelith. Friendly, clean, well-designed. With a lot more events on it. I don't like the “click to see upcoming events/click on the three-word description for details” approach; I'd rather just have all the relevant information on one line and possibly a link to a descriptive paragraph (or rollover text, if that were possible) on the front page. Simple and straightforward.
Anyway. If anyone has any suggestions on the shortest route to goal (other than burning money hiring a programmer), I'm all ears. Many of you are more Internet-savvy than me, so you may well have great suggestions on how I can get up to speed on some simple databasey stuff and start rocking out with this project.
An idea of how the thing might look is this: 
but hopefully it will look less bum. |
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