June 11th 2010 / Go: The event source for Lane County / Django-powered entertainment website

Arts events calendar “go” is online

By Bridget Baker

The newsroom last week began to beta launch a new “go” entertainment events site at registerguard.com. The idea for this project has been to capture content into a live, searchable database—a community calendar of events online—that news can then reverse publish to the print edition without a lot of duplicated effort. The concept is that news sources and eventually community members can upload information themselves without news aides, reporters or editors having to generate it. Deputy Managing Editor Carl Davaz has headed up the project.

“A big round of applause for John Heasly and Micky Hulse for working so hard and creatively over the past few months to make this project come together” Carl said. “Thanks also to Lisa Crossley, Steve Collier and Mark Johnson as we’ve tried to leverage their ideas and preserve their calendar workflow.”

The intention throughout the project has been to connect the community with this calendar. Initial meetings with Arts & Business Alliance leaders helped to refine the concept. Arts organizations around the city have begun to participate in the process by using the direct conduit to contribute content. The editors feel there’s been a lot of enthusiasm. First tier contributors will be able upload events via spreadsheets and enhance calendar entries with expanded descriptions, including images and embedded video and audio.

“Go Entertainment” is available under the Entertainment menu at registerguard.com or by entering the address registerguard.com/go.

“Visually it’s a pretty simple design” Carl explains. “Featured entertainment events attract attention. Visitors can search for events in several ways. You can search by category at the top of the page. You can search by date on the widget or the calendar. The widget can be shared with other sites. And you can search by venue at the bottom of the page.”

Other content includes latest blog posts, limited recent entertainment/arts stories and reviews from the print edition. Non-Flash picture presentations are viewable on any mobile device.

It will be an advertising-supported site, but to limit clutter for visitors and provide the best environment for advertisers, we’re limiting the ads to two online standard ad units, the leaderboard and box ad.

Next phases of development will focus on a new mobile presentation format and the addition of other features like supplementing entries with Facebook commenting.

Ultimately, “go” will have a broader mission to include events other than entertainment, such as community events, sports, business—really anything that readers will want to know about and go to.

This was my first attempt at building an embedable javascript widget; See the code and example output above.