OK guys, I'm working on a project. It's a big project. The idea is to have a website where people can post stuff that's happening. It can be concerts, classes, club meetings and of course LUGs. The website is called Event Zip. (I'm not sure if I like the name, but if you've ever tried to register a domain name, you know how difficult it can be with all the domain squatters out there.)

I've started adding some LUG Meetings. If anyone is interested in helping me out it by posting some Lug meetings it would be greatly appreciated. It would also help keep people find your LUG.

Thanks in advance,
Brian

Great idea but:

I almost didn't get to your site because the response was so slow. I don't know if the problem is the topology of my connection, or if you need to speed it up.

I hate cookies of all kinds.

I couldn't post a recurring event.: the HLUG (Houston TX) regular Wed. night Workshop at HAL-PC, 6-9 pm, informal. Virtually every Wed. -- we get cancelled about 3 times a year for holidays.

If it's any consolation, I can't do it here either. I'm not about to come back every week to renew, nor do I feel like writing a cURL script cron job to do it automatically.

Finally, your time zone menu does not accommodate Daylight Time.

Thanks for the suggestions. How slow are we talking? Was is slow as in 3 seconds or as in 30 seconds?

Cookies -- I everyone has them, I just set my browser to delete them on close. Sorry that my answer isn't better, but to get rid of them I'd have to do some serious core hacking of Drupal.

Recurring event. Ok this is good. The only thing want is to make sure there aren't a bunch of dead LUG meeting still in the database in a few years.

I'm not sure about the time zone thing. Unless the time zone is going to be taken into accout during the search, all I'd need it a check box that would let people know if it's daylight or not. In terms of priorities, I'm not sure that this it that big of a deal.


Thanks for the advice.

30-ish. -- I was in the middle of ssh'ing to a friend's box to links to your site when it came up. Just now it was more like 10 sec.

I still hate cookies, but it doesn't sound like you are depending on them to do anything. I have a habit of automatically clicking "Refuse All".

I thought about the dead events problem, perhaps you could allow renewal by e-mail, maybe every 6 mo. or year, -- I wouldn't want to fill out that form more than once.

Can you accept iCalendar or vCalendar input?

30 seconds it to long. I blame my hosting company. Sometimes their mysql server is almost nonresponsive. I just turned on caching. I hope that will help. If someone can suggest a hosting company, without having an affilate account, I'd be interested in their opinion.

As far as the cookies go. I'm using a content management system called Drupal. I don't know why they have cookies for anonymous users. I'd have to look in to it. But because of the complexity of the system, I'm not sure that I'm going to be hacking it anytime soon, lest I break something.

There's a way you can export data into an iCalendar, but I don't know if anyone's written a mod to allow importing from an iCalendar.

For convevience in testing, here are the links repeated: Event Zip . . . LUG Meetings.
I also (temporarily) turned on seconds & blinking dots on my clock to facilitate accurate timing.

Now for the bad news -- "Event Zip" took 71 sec. & "LUG Meetings" almost instantly went to "Unable to connect to database server". Then when I tried to save the error page, I found I had the actual page saved; when I reloaded the live one, it instantly became the correct content; & when I tried clicking the link again, it loaded perfectly & quickly. As we say here in TX, go figure.

A 2nd try w/ "Event Zip" got near instant response, but I have a caching proxy in my firewall. For a 3rd trial, I reloaded instead & that took a little over 30 sec.

For verification I used links via ssh from a box on another provider -- still about 20 sec.

Same ssh/links connection brought up "LUG Meetings" in about 8 sec.

This is so weird -- I just got reload times on "Event Zip" of 6 & 3. I have no idea what's happening, will test again later.

I think my web hosting companing has problems with their mysql server. It may be overloaded at times. Want to recomend a better hosting company? btw, I'm a little suspicious of recomendations that contain affilate links.

No recommendations from me -- I don't use any.

BTW, no problems today; perhaps the problem was transitory.