A new LWN events calendar
LWN readers who have consulted our Linux Events
Calendar over the last years will have likely noticed that it is one of
the less attractive parts of a site which, in general, is not well known
for its eye candy. It is visually unattractive, difficult to read, and not
entirely easy to navigate through. It is not integrated with the rest of
the LWN site; it is, in fact, based on an ancient version of Zope and must
contain no end of interesting security holes. And, as if that weren't
enough, the calendar has increased its resource use, to the point that it
is the culprit behind most of the LWN site slowdowns experienced over the
last few months.
It is also history. After a couple of weeks of frantic hacking, LWN.net is happy to announce the new LWN.net Events Calendar. There are a few advantages over the old system:
- It is somewhat less ugly than its predecessor. Please note that a
few residual rendering issues remain. It looks nice most of the time
in Firefox, looks better in Konqueror, and looks terrible with
Internet Explorer. It seems that your site code hacker's naive idea
of how CSS works does not entirely match IE's naive ideas on that
subject. Our response, of course, is to recommend immediate Firefox
upgrades for all IE users, but we'll try to smooth out the rendering
as well.
- There are a couple of preferences controlling how calendars are
displayed; logged-in users can tweak them in the account area. In particular, the starting day
of the week can be changed, and the calendar can be configured to
always display in the "printable page" format, making it easier to
read in relatively narrow windows.
- LWN readers can now submit events directly into the system. All events go through an approval phase before being posted, so there is no point in submitting uninteresting events (like the East Armpit Meds Fest, the Annual Blog Spammers' Rendezvous, or SCO Forum) to the calendar. If you have an event you would like to see on the calendar, and you've checked to be sure it's not already there, please go to the event entry screen and tell us about it.
Planned future enhancements include increasing the number of event types
represented, adding different calendar views, and an iCal export
mechanism. Meanwhile, have a look, and let us know if you have any
improvements to suggest.