Blog from the 'burbs

When I first started playing with this site almost 10 years ago, I used an Access database and html table cells to show the location of various shopping centers along Rockville Pike. It was clumsy but pretty cool given the state of Internet technology in 1998. Several years later, I turned it into a Flash map, when Flash 4, the first version that could communicate with a database, came out. I've finally started on a third version of the map, using Flash 8 and the wonderful object-oriented programming powers of actionscript. My inspiration was the zoning map I saw displayed at the second Zoning Forum at Glenview Mansion. It seemed like a perfect thing to make work interactively, so I bashed away over the holidays tracing out the zone boundaries over a map I'd already started on for use at this site. (Thanks to Katie Mencarini of the Planning Dept, I now have the beautiful big map that she created to work from).

The result can be seen here. You can see all zones and find out about each one as you mouse over it, or hide all the zones and turn them on individually to see which parts of Rockville are zoned Mixed Use Business, eg. Of course, I have a zillion plans for additions to the map, but while the zoning discussion is underway, it's a zoning map. Here's what I learned about the new zoning ordinance from Jim Wasilak, City Planner, and John Tyner from the Zoning Ordinance Review Committee at our Woodley Gardens West Civic Association meeting last Monday:

Most of the new zones are based on the ones in the existing zoning ordinance (created in 1975 and modified 200+ times since then), with changes to accommodate Rockville's current state. With most land already developed, the changes are aimed at redevelopment to support mixed uses (especially residential and commercial), to improve pedestrian friendliness, to control 'mansionization', to enhance the environment, and to keep our park and open space. It includes things like wider sidewalk requirements, specification of paved surface percentage allowed on a lot, and in addition to building dimension and height specifications, adds a specification for the transition in height between commercial and adjoining residential areas. The new proposed zoning ordinance also replaces the 9 processes previously required for site review to a single site review process, with the inclusion of different reviewers (City council, City staff, Planning Commission) dependent on the scale of the proposed project.

The zoning ordinance works in conjunction with two other City processes already in place: the Comprehensive Transportation Review (CTR), which examines the traffic impact of any proposed developments, and the APFO, which looks at schools, EMS, utilities and other infrastructure needs associated with new development. Regulation of home businesses based on their impact on the neighborhood is also included in the ordinance. For a look at the actual Zoning Ordinance Draft and information about the process, see the City website.

Well, the front page of this site is now a complete study in garish color combinations, but I think I like it that way. I've never been particularly bold colorwise when it comes to website design, so I'm very happy that I chanced on a photo of one of Chica Brunsvold's paintings (detail below) at the Strathmore website one day, which provided the inspiration for the current look of this site. I found it a really delightful painting; fun, vibrant and endlessly interesting to look at. I love those birds!

As I had done previously with the fall version of Rockville Living, I used the painting as a source to choose colors from and built the rest of the site around it. I was a little sad when the exhibit at Strathmore ended and it was time to swap the painting out with something else (the zoning map), but Chica has generously allowed me to continue to use her birds on the other pages until it's time to change the site again for spring. Originally they also linked to her website, but she is currently experiencing some technical difficulties and it's not available. I'll post a note here when it goes back up though, as I think everyone should be able to see the wonderful whimsical work of this Northern Virginia artist.

Photos, please

So, painting gone and map in place, the latest addition to the garish front page is that goofy orange-haired girl, who is hoping to solicit photos of you, dear reader(s), doing whatever you love to do in Rockville. It's a great opportunity to get some free publicity for you and/or your favorite organization, restaurant or place to hang out. I'll post whichever are my favorites for each of the categories on the front page (eat, live, play, shop, work, create, see), as outlined here. Get your cellphones or cameras out and start snapping!

I've been looking at different calendar-sharing formats lately to see which, if any, are most used by Rockville businesses and organizations. Existing calendar standards include

• iCalendar, which is a text-based (but not XML) format that is the basis for iCal, a format that can used to publish and allow saving of events in Microsoft Outlook and Mac iCalendar. Barnes and Noble publishes events in the iCal format for their Rockville and Gaithersburg stores, but they are published as individual .ics files (one per event), with no way I've found to grab multiple events at once.
• hCalendar, a representation of iCalendar in semantic HTML. hCalendar events can be directly embedded in web pages and styled with CSS. I didn't see any example of this being used in Rockville, but I did see it at the Boston University website.

Another option for making calendar data available is with an RSS feed, customized as needed, like the ones used by meetup.com. This is a sample calendar RSS file from the Green Home Meetup:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<rss version="2.0"><channel>
<title><![CDATA[Events - Green Home Meetup Group]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://greenhome.meetup.com/101/calendar/]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Events - Green Home Meetup Group]]></description>
<copyright>Copyright 2002-2006 Meetup, Inc.</copyright>
<lastBuildDate>Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:31:29 EST</lastBuildDate>
<managingEditor>support@meetup.com (Meetup)</managingEditor>

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Meetup Get Together]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://greenhome.meetup.com/101/calendar/7125041/</guid>
<description><![CDATA[<p>Green Home Meetups > Green Home Meetup Group</p> <p>Charlotte, NC 28217 - USA</p> <p>Sunday, February 3 at 3:00 PM</p> <p>Attending: 0</p> <p>Details: http://greenhome.meetup.com/101/calendar/7125041/</p> ]]></description>
<pubDate>Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:31:29 EST</pubDate>
</item>
</channel></rss>

The Montgomery County Public Library system, bless their web developers' hearts, publishes an RSS feed like this for all library events at the Rockville and Twinbrook (and other county) libraries. Theirs is similar to the one displayed above, but has a very useful extra link field, for linking to a page with more information, and you can get information for any number of upcoming days -- you just specify the number you want in the URL. They do not include CDATA tags in their description fields though, and should do to make the file parsable. After adding CDATA tags, I was able to parse the library RSS files with a PHP script that writes them to a database for display in the Calendar.

It would be great if everyone (hello, Austin Grill, City of Rockville, Outta the Way Cafe, VisArts, REDI, Strathmore, Parilla, MTC, and all you other Rockville movers and shakers) offered either hCalendar or RSS feeds (for grabbing lots of events at once) and iCal files (for saving individual events to a personal calendar). hCalendar and RSS formats are straightforward to parse (except maybe for getting the date into a useable format) and make it easy to display the information in a browser without having to do much else to the data. The iCal format is more widely used by individuals and is more compact, though I don't know if you can include a link for more information with it (which you probably don't need in your personal calendar, but is useful in an aggregated online calendar). A sample of the compact iCal format:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 10.0 MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:1.0
BEGIN: VEVENT
DTSTART:20080119T151500Z
DTEND:20080119T154500Z
SUMMARY;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:Storytime for 2's and 3's
DESCRIPTION;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:Stories and activities for ages 2-3 with an adult. Child must be at least 24 months old. No registration. This a repeat of the previous program. LOCATION;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:Rockville-Children's Programming Room
UID:1020080119T151500Z
PRIORITY:3
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

If it isn't already obvious, I'd love to see more widespread use of calendar RSS feeds, as it would greatly simplify gathering and displaying calendar events throughout the area and let a wider audience find out easily what's going on in this great city of ours. I imagine more and more businesses and organizations will be doing this though, as they realize how much it is to their advantage to make descriptions of upcoming events easy to grab and save. Please let me know if yours is one of them!

A couple days ago, Horatio Fields from UMDG/Netreach sent a link to a sound clip of the The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, who are playing at Robert Parilla Performing Arts Center at Montgomery College this coming Tuesday, Jan 22. The clip is Amazing Grace and they do indeed sound amazing!

You can hear that clip here and also via a link on the Rockville Living Calendar page. Anywhere you see a music note in the calendar, there is either a direct link to a sound clip ("Hear a sample") or to a page with mp3 links that you can select from.

I love Christa Carignan's gardening blog. When I look at the ten-day forecast at weather.com and see that I'll be freezing into the foreseeable future, it's nice to go and read about someone actively gardening even in January, thinking about gardening, planning for spring, talking about gardening, living to garden!

Today I see that Christa has published a wonderfully detailed Beginner's Guide to Growing Food in DC, made even better by the fact that it's a blog and people have added helpful comments of their own. Time to start thinking about lettuce and spinach and collecting some seeds to grow in the spring, which I have renewed inspiration to do after watching this video on how to grow basil from seed. I will also try to plant a few more things from Sara Tangren's Chesapeake Native Nursery collection. Last year, I planted spotted mint and foxglove that I bought during Mike Tidwell's Clean Energy Open House, and they both seem to have done well (of course -- they're natives).

Of course, before the planting starts, you can also be working on making the stuff your plants will grow in, as you dream about what you'll be planting in it.