Occasionally I’m asked if I can use this site to publicise Labour-themed, or general political events; sometimes I’m able to comply, other times not. What there seems to be a distinct lack of is a diary/calendar facility that:
- Lets many people add events, easily.
- Lets many people see – and monitor – those events, easily.
It’s surprising that there’s no central source for Labour events (or not to my knowledge), and that people still have to email about – or post specifically about – upcoming events. Fisking Central’s calendar (complete with web-page widget) was probably the inspiration for this idea, but the more people we can get to publish events, the more useful the resulting calendar will be to Labour members and supporters.
So, I’ve simply set up a Google Calendar and shared it.
If you have events to publicise that could be of interest, or you want to have editorial rights in future – and have a Google account – simply contact us and we will give you those rights, subject to basic sanity checks. For B4L Forum users, details of the shared login are already available here, so you can log in and add/edit straightaway.
What sort of event can you add?
- CLP meetings.
- Social events.
- Talks and lectures.
- Conference and fringe events.
- Anything you’re happy for the general public to see.
When our site redesign goes live we’ll feature a miniature representation of the Calendar in our sidebar, but you can beat us to it by adding a widget to your own blog now (hell, it’s not our bandwidth). Here’s where to go. You may well end up with something like this:
You can choose your own look, but here’s the code for the one above:
I’ll post more tips and advice once I’ve worked out what else Google Calendar can do.
Well, that’s just typical. I took the calendar down today, as we only had one event on it, and the trumba software really slowed down the site. But thanks anyway.
If you come up with a few events, we’ll ressurect it, publicise them, and maybe even try to find some non-Labour related fun as well (there is such a thing, so I’m told…)
fiskingcentral.typepad.com/