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Upcoming is downgoing, Elm City is ongoing
Here’s Andy Baio’s farewell to Upcoming, a service I’ve been involved with for a decade. In a March 2005 blog post I wrote about what I hoped Upcoming would become, in my town and elsewhere, and...
View ArticleStrategic choices for calendar publishers
Although I haven’t been able to confirm this officially yet, it looks like FuseCal, the HTML screen-scraping service that I’ve been using (and recommending) as a way to convert calendar-like web pages...
View ArticleMore fun than herding servers
Until recently, the elmcity calendar aggregator was running as a single instance of an Azure worker role. The idea all along, of course, was to exploit the system’s ability to farm out the work of...
View ArticleWhy we need an XML representation for iCalendar
Translations: Croatian On this week’s Innovators show I got together with two of the authors of a new proposal for representing iCalendar in XML. Mike Douglass is lead developer of the Bedework...
View ArticleTopical event hubs
The elmcity project began with a focus on aggregating events for communities defined by places: cities, towns. But I realized a while ago that it could also be used to aggregate events for communities...
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Curation, meta-curation, and live Net radio
I’ve long been dissatisfied with how we discover and tune into Net radio. This iTunes screenshot illustrates the problem: Start with a genre, pick a station in that genre, then listen to that station....
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Two projects for civic-minded student programmers
One of the key findings of the elmcity project, so far, is that there’s a lot of calendar information online, but very little in machine-readable form. Transforming this implicit data about public...
View Articleelmcity and WordPress MU: Questions and answers
In the spirit of keystroke conservation, I’m relaying some elmcity-related questions and answers from email to here. Hopefully it will attract more questions and more answers. Dear Mr. Udell, I am...
View ArticleFriendFeed for project collaboration
For me, FriendFeed has been a new answer to an old question — namely, how to collaborate in a loosely-coupled way with people who are using, and helping to develop, an online service. The elmcity...
View ArticleAsk and ye may receive, don’t ask and ye surely will not
This fall a small team of University of Toronto and Michigan State undergrads will be working on parts of the elmcity project by way of Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects (UCOSP), organized...
View ArticleFamiliar idioms in Perl, Python, JavaScript, and C#
When I started working on the elmcity project, I planned to use my language of choice in recent years: Python. But early on, IronPython wasn’t fully supported on Azure, so I switched to C#. Later,...
View ArticleQuerying mobile data objects with LINQ
I’m using US census data to look up the estimated populations of the cities and towns running elmcity hubs. The dataset is just plain old CSV (comma-separated variable), a format that’s more popular...
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