Bea Woodget wrote:In other words, my understanding of what you say is: because few YC managers are lazy and/or not able to correctly manage their private calendars, the whole community has to bear the consequences of their laxness ??? Massive administration job??? Managing a YC is their choice, let them assume...
It's not about managing a club's calendars, it's about managing the aggregate calendar system. Current situation: 1 aggregate calendar, 10 club calendars, some clubs still to be added. When a club calendar gets added, the embedding code needs to be updated. To do this, go to "Calendar settings" for the aggregate calendar, and then pick "Customize the color, size, and other options". The only calendar that is selected is the aggregate calendar - google deaults to this. Select the ten club calendars, and then select a default view from agenda, weekly or monthly. The embed code in the text box at top-right updates. Copy the embed code and paste it into the local copy of the calendar page file twice - once to embed the calendar, and again to provide the copiable code so that others can embed it as well. Go back to google calendar, pick another default view, and paste the code into the calendar page again. Back to google once more, pick the last default view, and paste that into the calendar page. Fire up FTP program, upload the page, and check that it all.
That's what happens just now. I'll probably turn the embed code into variables so that I only have to hit CTRL-V once for each default view, but I haven't got round to that yet. There are still some clubs that haven't submitted their calendar address, so I can expect a few more clicks to select club calendars when they come along. Lets assume that there will be 15 club calendars. Lets also assume that, to keep things readable and relevant (to people with different interests), we now want to make sub-calendars to cover different event types. And lets take something approaching worst case...
Racing
Cruising
Training
Special Events
Social
The whole lot
Five sub-calendars to aggregate event types, and one mega-calendar to show everything. So, each club (worst case) makes 5 calendars to cover the 5 event types, and their own aggregate calendar to bring them all together. That's 6 calendars per club. Whether or not the aggregate system needs to use all six, or can get away with five, depends on how much clicking the administrator wants to do to build the mega-calendar, compared to how much trawling through lists the administrator wants to do to avoid clicking. Lets assume the admin likes clicking (depending on how google works, it may need to be that way anyway).
So, 6 calendars to handle the aggregations, plus 5 calendars from 15 clubs, means a total of 81 calendars to deal with. To build an event-specific calendar...
Go to "Calendar settings" for the calendar, and then pick "Customize the color, size, and other options". The only calendar that is selected is the calendar being built. Trawl up and down the list of 81 calendars, looking for and selecting the appropriate 15 club sub-calendars for that event type. Then select a default view from agenda, weekly or monthly. The embed code in the text box at top-right updates. Copy the embed code and paste it into the local copy of the calendar page (paste once - changed to use variables by now). Go back to google calendar, pick another default view, and paste the code into the calendar page again. Back to google once more, pick the last default view, and paste that into the calendar page.
Do this another four times. Then do the same thing, but selecting all of the club sub-calendars. The calendar page now has six calendars, in each of three default views - 18 discrete calendars and blocks of embed code. Upload the calendar page to the site, and check everything.
We now have a fantastic, event-specific categorised mega calendar system.
Note that we do not have regional calendars at this time. Lets say that Blake and Big Fish reckon they're big enough to have regional calendars, and that there's still a need for an overall calendar. To set this up...
Create two new aggregate calendars to handle each region's all-events listings (regional mega-calendars).
Create two sets of five sub-calendars to handle the event types within the regions.
Our list of calendars is now 93.
Do the same stuff as above, but selecting from sub-calendars pertaining to less than 15 clubs. (Lets say 6 clubs in each region.)
The number of code blocks for embedding is now... 18 for the set of all clubs, plus 18 for each regional subset, giving 54 copy'n'pastes.
Upload the calendar page.
Check everything.
Hope it works.
Find broken bits.
Fix them.
Upload again.
Check again.
The dust settles, and the sun rises, heralding a new dawn of calendrical sophistication that is hitherto unheard of in SL sailing.
Then somebody decides to form a yacht club. They establish a healthy calendar of events of various types, get really popular, and form an annexe in another region. To add them into the mega-calendrical universe, do the whole lot again, but with 103 calendars.
The fundamental issue is this: with google, you cannot update one part of the structure and have that update cascade into the rest of the structure. You can update an event
within a calendar, and that will cascade, but you can't do the same when you add or remove a calendar. To do the latter, you have to rebuild all affected parts of the structure from scratch. As I keep saying, the more fancy or flexible we try to make this, the more complex and onerous it becomes. It also becomes more and more error prone, which means it becomes even more onerous as time is spent correcting errors - if a club is missed out from an event aggregate calendar, for example, that calendar has to be rebuilt from scratch.
I don't know what you'd call that, but a massive administration job is what it looks like to me.
Ok, even if again I disagree with the method. For me, it is always better to start with good foundations (set-up) than to move when it is too late. But, ok, let's see what will happen. (I think the calendar is already unreadable, because very busy, and different syntaxes are used, no guidelines).
The community is free to lobby for standards in syntax.
An idea: as most of the sailing/racing events are weekly events, what about a perpetual calendar for those events. It could be done with a syntax we all agree (eg: YC/Class/location/RD/description...) and filtered with check boxes on each criteria/field. Google is not the right tool for that, but a simple table is enough as events are very stable. Then, an aggregated google calendar could be used for additional events...
I don't think google is the right tool for any of this. Donning my old IT Jockey hat for a moment, I see an attempt to build a fancy system using a tool that is simply not adequate for the task it's being asked to do. I call this "tying shite together with bits of string", and it is a flawed strategy. If we're going to use google calendar, then the structure has to be kept pretty simple. Having looked at it in more depth, I think the whole sub-categories of events idea is a non-starter.
I think I'll look into options for a calendar plugin for the forum. No promises, but it might produce something more usable than google.
the trick ,, please share it here.
