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The Scalefour Society Calendar

The Scalefour Society Calendar is hosted on the Google Calendar service. Its a multi-user calendar, so if you have an event you wish to add, contact the Membership Secretary via the links on the ScaleFour Page, and he can give you permission to add and change entries on the calendar.

The Calendar is totally dependent on member's adding information; if you don't add it, it doesn't appear. So, don't be shy, put your event on the Calendar !

Main things to consider when adding to the calendar:

• Have a short informative title (which will be the main link in the panel to the right), it makes it easier to read. A title like "Model Show" isn't very helpful, whereas name of layout appearing is useful. Don't include the venue in the title, that goes elsewhere.
• Know the date !
  Make one entry for each day, the calendar has problems with events spread over multiple days.
• Fill in where the event takes place, if you can, include a post code or proper postal address. Then the "map" feature will point to the venue.
• (New June 18 2008) You can put website addresses (URLs) in the description area in the form "http://somewhere.something..."
• You can add items well into the future, but the panel to the right only shows 6 months ahead. It will automatically show your event once its within six months. It also ignores old events (more than a few days in the past).
• The website panel can take up to 12 hours to update. This is deliberate, the site holds a cache of the Google Calendar to help moderate the network traffic.

How the technical website stuff works.

The Scalefour Society Google Calendar is available in several data forms; iCal, XML and HTML.

The script uses the XML feed to produce the panel to the right. This is processed initially using the "Google Calendar" script and SimplePie, with a few simple additions/changes to suit ourneeds. PHP code is available on request.

The calendar script and the blog aggregation script used on this site were developed by Nigel Cliffe, who is webmaster for 2mm Scale Association as well as a Scalefour member, hence an obvious similarity to features on the 2mm Scale Association website !