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About

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A short introduction

by Pete Lindsay

Event: St Andrews is a free listing website covering events in St Andrews, holding a rolling year’s information. Using community resources – that is keeping an eye on notice boards, posters, advertisements, etc, around town, and other web sites – as well as directly submitted information, it is the most comprehensive website for what is going on in St Andrews.

Events listed cover a wide range: from fundraising coffee mornings to university open lectures, charity runs to art exhibitions, music from sacred to profane.

To be listed, events should be open to the public and within, or very close to, St Andrews. The rule-of-thumb for “very close” is whether I’m prepared to walk to the out-of-town venue from the town centre. [Update: I now have an OutOfTown tag for events around St Andrews.]

Listing is free – it could hardly be anything else given the sources, but people do ask sometimes.

History

The Event: St Andrews site grew out of the Royal Burgh of St Andrews Community Council’s news sheet and event listing, Event: which I ran from Autumn ’96 to Summer ’07. The original web site started in ’97 as a way of making available information on events that fell between the monthly printed news sheets.

An early form of this site can be seen on the “Wayback Machine” internet archive. Take a trip back to February 1998...

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Technical

Links to other sites are occasionally checked with the excellent Integrity website link checker from Peacock Media.

Most events in the Month pages are formatted as hCalendar microformats; fortunately there're a lot of standards to choose from…

Changelog:

29 April 2012 – Marked up the event tags (Sport, Music, Free etc) as microformat Categories.

Geo tags: still in the class="location" span element, but now in an empty <abbr class="geo" title="lat;long"></abbr> following the [map]. May 2012 and new items have the format, other months’ events will be converted over the next few days.

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26 April 2012 – started checking microformats with the Operator Add-On for Firefox. Unfortunately it does not recognise my Geo tags so they'll be changing.

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25 April 2012 – looking at value-class-pattern formatting possibilities in the date fields.

Nothing exciting on the start date/time yet (still trying to understand the examples) but I’ve added dtend for finish times, e.g. <span class="dtend">9pm</span> in the May 2012 page – N.B. the date has to be inferred from the context of the start of the event.

N.B. (2) long events over many dates, such as exhibitions, still have: <span class="dtend" title="2012-05-19">19 May</span>

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25 April 2012 – added a form of geo microformat to the Locations. Most Locations have a Lat,Long link to Google maps. I experimented with using Google’s short links (g.co) which hides these, but it turned out someone used the Lat Long pair, hence the geo to give a Lat;Long reference, which is more standard but unrecognised by Google. Ho hum.

Example:

<span class="location">Byre Theatre, Abbey Street, KY16 9LA <a class="geo" title="56.339;-2.7912" href="http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=56.339,-2.7912(Byre+Theatre)&z=17">[map]</a>

earlier entries (or ad-hoc) entries won't have the class="geo" title="56.339;-2.7912" or equivalent

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24 April 2012 – changed the <abbr> to <span> as mobile IE9 formats <abbr> in tiny and I haven’t worked out how to fix it in css :(

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20 April 2012 – Default event template until follows. N.B. redundant or duplicate fields are usually dropped:

<p class="vevent <tag>">
<abbr class="dtstart" title="2012-mm-ddThh:mm">hh.mm[am/pm/blank]</abbr>
[- hh.mm[am/pm]];
<span class="summary">
<a class="url" href="<#URL#>">
<#SUMMARY#>
</a>
</span>
<span class="description"><#DESCRIPTION#></span>;
<span class="organizer"><#ORGANISER#></span>;
<span class="location"><#LOCATION#></span>;
<span class="email"><#EMAIL#></span>;
<span class="tel"><#TEL#></span>;
<span class="cost"><#COST#></span>;
<span class="tag"><#TAG#></span>.
</p>

Notes

Event tags are classes, selected by stylesheet switching.

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