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'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!

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!

Over the weekend, I wrote a script I've been meaning to get around to for awhile: one that runs through the database contents and converts URL's like "rockvilleliving.com/listcategory.php?cat=94" into something more meaningful like "rockvilleliving.com/apartments_townhouses", creating a list that can be put into an htaccess file in this form:

RewriteRule ^apartments_townhouses$ listcategory.php?cat=94 [NC,L]

(where NC means ignore the case, and L means don't process any more rules if this one is a match). This does an automatic redirect to the right php page, as is done with the Quick directory lookup at the top of this page for example, and makes those pages more search-engine indexable (they won't appear to be dynamically generated) and also more recognizable and memorable. This page has a good description of the how and why of doing rewrites.

I used the Yahoo Maps AJAX API to add location maps to RockvilleLiving.com. You can now find the location of any type of business or organization (hotels, for example, or performing arts centers) in the database on a map, as well as the location of a shopping center with a list of its businesses (Congressional Plaza, for example). I'm really excited to have got this working! For anyone wishing to do something similar with maps, I also recommend this online batch geocoder, which takes an Excel file as input and returns the same file with latitude and longitude information in it. Just make sure you remove extra letters from street addresses or it will return incorrect locations.

If you've visited RockvilleLiving.com before, you'll notice it's a bit different now. I wanted it to look more representative of the things that make Rockville a great place to live: the beautiful historic buildings like Glenview Mansion and the Red Brick Courthouse, the energetic community spirit here that has brought about our new and promising Town Center, the vibrant performing arts scene, and, above all, the presence of natural beauty and wildlife in our otherwise very suburban setting. The picture at the top of this page and the home page is a Photoshop'd collage of several of my favorite places and things in Rockville.

More importantly, I wanted to attempt to bring the database up-to-date, something I've let fall behind over the past two years as my other client work, teaching, and being the mom of two teenagers consumed all my waking hours. My other goals were to better categorize the database contents and to bring back the calendar that used to be here (and available at Rocknet). Suggestions or comments on either can be sent with the link above.

It's especially inspiring to keep track of what's new in Rockville these days, as we've watched the beautiful new library take shape and continue to see changes to the Town Center buildings daily. So keep those cards and letters, by which I mean calendar events and directory additions, coming.