The Squid List Gets A Re-Design As It Nears 10 Years
The Squid List is our curated list of art, culture and technology events taking place in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Squid List turns 10 this year (in September), so we felt it was time to make some updates and improvements to our old friend. Yesterday we launched a shiny new version of the The Squid List using the Helios Calendar script:
http://laughingsquid.com/squidlist/events/
One of the biggest changes with this re-designed version is that we flipped the list, so that the events are now added directly into the database first, then approved for the online calendar, which creates an RSS feed that then generates email for those who have subscribed to the new FeedBurner email list option. The list now goes out as a daily digest, with the event listings and descriptions, along with a link back to the online calendar. If you still want to receive individual announcements, then we recommend subscribing the RSS feed or subscribe using FeedBurner RSS-To-Email.
Some of The Squid List changes and features include:
- New calendar front-end. A facelift with enhanced functionality.
- Email is now generated from the RSS feed.
- The new event submission form includes a WYSIWYG editor and the event entries on the online calendar can now have embedded links, images and HTML. Careful with that blink tag.
- Advanced search features. You can now search by keyword, within date ranges, by city or by category. Finally you can track down all of those amazing Moraga events.
- Events now include links to lookup the venue location on Google Maps and the city weather information. Great for finding that hidden warehouse in Dogpatch along with knowing to bring a wool sweater for the San Francisco summer.
- New mobile page so you can access the Squid List on a cell phone or other mobile device. It makes you and your iPhone or Blackberry that much cooler.
For more info on The Squid List, please see the Squid List FAQ. If you are an event producer and you want to submit a Bay Area event to The Squid List, please see our Event Submission Guidelines.
Enjoy the new list and thanks for a great 10 years!
UPDATE 1: hCalendar support is on the todo list.
UPDATE 2: We now have a new email list option. It’s using FeedBurner’s RSS-To-Email feature, which will send out a daily digest with full event descriptions.
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on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
What about hCalendar support?
on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
Wait, isn’t that something that Tantek or Ryan should be asking? hCalendar is on the todo list. Eran, do you want to volunteer to do the markup?
on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
While I enjoy the new web version, the email list as a digest is a bummer. I’ll still get use out of the website (and appreciate all your work in doing this), but I wish you hadn’t got rid of those individual emails.
How I used to use squidlist: take a quick glance at items as they came in, delete them if not interested. Then, sorting by subject, I would have a nice calendar of upcoming events that I cared about in my inbox.
on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
The calendar script that we ended up using for The Squid List re-design is Helios Calendar. We searched for a good calendar script (using PHP and MySQL, with RSS support) for over a year and Helios was one of the best ones out there, but like most others, it only has a digest email option. If you are looking for individual event listings, then you might want to try using our RSS feed.
on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
I learned long ago not to volunteer for anything :) But it would be nice if *someone* created a page with all current events, including full details and venue details in vcal and hcard. From there, easy transformation to iCal and subscription with either apple’s calendar or M$ outlook ‘07.
on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
I hadn’t checked out the new RSS - being able to limit it by category actually solves my problem perfectly (I really only want to see art, film, and robotics events). Thanks!
on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Yay, digest email! I was close to resigning my Squid Subscription due to inbox overload. This new format is much more useful for me. Thanks for all the hard werk!
on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
Looks great, and congrats! A true San Francisco institution.
One suggestion: How about an RSS feed based on dates? Like, an RSS feed that updates at 6am with links to all the events that day. For last minute procrastinators like myself, that would be golden.
on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 6:20 pm
Jackson, the level of RSS feed customization has greatly improved over the previous version of The Squid List, however I’m not aware of a way of creating the kind of feed your are requesting. That sounds like it might be a feature request for the developer of the script.
on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 11:11 am
cool! this has a lot of potential. my two comments:
1. in the digest, can there be a short description of an event under the title?
2. …that would enable a text-only version. many people still don’t have access to HTML-based email, or it’s inconvenient. I’m a geek, so I have my mailer translate the HTML to plaintext, but then I just see a bunch of URLs.
on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Chris, to answer your questions:
1. The current digest does not have an opton to show any description informaiton, however we have just added a new email list option, which uses FeedBurner’s RSS-To-Email feature. It sends out a daily digest with full event descriptions. For more info, check out option A in the Email List Subscription Info section of the Squid List FAQ.
2. The current digest does not have a plain text option or else we would have made that available (see my update about HTML email on this blog post). It’s possible that the new FeedBurner list has this option or will be adding it in the future, so we are looking into that possibility.
on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 4:42 pm
Re hCal on the todo list, hella cool! Thanks!
on Friday, July 21st, 2006 at 10:30 am
Understand the need for change but disappointed with the new format… the daily digest makes the email list useless as far as i’m concerned. Having an event list organized by submission date rather than event date makes no sense.
I used to be able to sort my mailbox by subject, then glance down the list for what’s going on tonight, now I have to open a bunch of different emails every time, with no clue which ones tonight’s events are scattered throughout… no thanks.
It’s not a huge deal, as we have the online calendar to look at events by date, but it was nice to have an event list I could look through on the way home on the bus. (I know an RSS feed might fit this bill but with the way computers already dominate my time already I’m very circumspect about having to add yet another technology to pay attention to every day… I preferred to get the posts by means I already use.)
on Friday, July 21st, 2006 at 2:24 pm
Mike, both digest formats list by date of event, not submission date. Where are you seeing the events listed by submission dates?
on Saturday, July 22nd, 2006 at 2:45 pm
Sorry, I’m not expressing myself clearly. Within each digest it’s sorted by event date, but now the overall volume of information I get is hierarchically broken up at the top level by submission date instead of event date.
Where my mailbox used to read:
SQUID [07/22] Opening of “Bay Area Bronze”
SQUID [07/22] Precita Eyes 10th Annual Urban Youth Arts Fes
SQUID [07/23] Family Art & Nature Day at the di Rosa Preser
SQUID [07/23] San Francisco Theater Festival
SQUID [07/24] Team Zombie Shuffle Gala Love Boat benefit fo
SQUID [07/25] A benefit for Trans/Gender Variant in Prison
SQUID [07/25] Ask a Scientist - Anniversary Trivia Party!
…which tells me the event dates, it now reads:
SQUID: 07-17-2006 - Squid List
SQUID: 07-18-2006 - Squid List
SQUID: 07-19-2006 - Squid List
SQUID: 07-20-2006 - Squid List
SQUID: 07-21-2006 - Squid List
…which tells me the submission dates. To find out what’s going this weekend, 7/22 - 7/23, I have to individually open each email, because events for the those dates are distributed among the emails marked 7-16, 7-17, 7-20 and 7-21. (I assume the date on the subject line of the digest is the submission date? Perhaps I should have said the ‘event posting date’ instead.)
Spurred by earlier comments I read up on hCal… that rocks hard! Technorati’s feed service worked with the old calendar in a proof-of-concept kind of way (all this month’s events displayed in iCal, but all on today’s date at 12:00 AM), the thought of being able to subscribe to the new calendar via technorati’s script and read it in iCal is very, very appealing.
One thing I’m thinking, there are already a lot of XSLTs for working with hCal out there, I might use FileMaker Advanced to whip up a standalone Squidlist Reader database and/or standalone app. I’ll post if I come up with anything.
on Saturday, July 22nd, 2006 at 2:56 pm
Mike, those are not the submission dates, they are the dates that the email was send out from the Helios calendar script. The events are ordered by date within the email. It looks like you are making a comparison between individual emails and the digest. As you already know form this blog post, Helios Calendar (the new Squid List script) only generates a daily digest email, not individual emails. Some people who still want individual emails have found a work-around using the RSS feed.
on Monday, July 24th, 2006 at 10:58 pm
I like the new, cleaner look of the web page. It’s easier to read and concise.
on Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
Scott
I wish you guys would have found a way to embrace calendar 2.0 - interactive calendars - in particular look at the sample interactive Auto Calendar at tne NY Times by Trumba
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/automobiles/event_calendar.html
note that it supports calendar Appointments to Yahoo, Outlook, Hotmail, Ical and Google.
And for interactivity, Google Calendar is the gold standard now - they just need to come out with tools to let it sync with other calendars. And it already supports inviting friends to an event.
By having submitters tag their events - say Dance, Reading, or Political you could create layered calendars very easily.
on Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
Kimo, Trumba appears to be a hosted calendar, the same way Google Calendar is. Unless they offer a stand alone script, then it wouldn’t really be an option for us, since we host own own content. Also, we want to keep the format as a listed calendar. As you know, we can sometimes have 20 or more events per day on our calendar, so a layered calendar would be a mess.
on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 10:53 am
Hi Scott
I understand about the desire for a stand alone script. It seems that there will be some mashup sooner or later to support what you desire and possibly a secondary posting of the events on a hosted solution.
On the layered issue, as I mentioned, by having submitters tag their events, one could quickly - interactively reduce the number of events displayed for each day, for example unselect Dancing if that is not of interest.
and in fact if you look at the Trumba calendar I referenced:
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/automobiles/event_calendar.html
You’ll see that without unselecting any of the layers it handles 20 events on July 16th with ease.
on Saturday, August 12th, 2006 at 11:33 am
Use Google Maps along side a scrollable calendar listing;
http://www.beatmaps.com/
You’ll have to look at what’s being done with other cities, because while they’re set up for san francisco already, there’s no listings as yet. Maybe you can change all that :)
on Sunday, August 20th, 2006 at 2:07 am
“You’ll see that without unselecting any of the layers it handles 20 events on July 16th with ease.” This is really easier.
on Sunday, August 20th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
I have to say that I’m really really disappointed with this change. I’ve been subscribing to the Squid list since 1998 - it’s been a significant part of my life in SF. I’ve just unsubscribed because the new digest format is completely useless because I can’t sort the listings by date. I would have to open all the emails from the past month or so to see what’s going on tonight. I tried to use the RSS feed converter which will send each event as a separate email, but the subscribe link doesn’t work. I read tons of blogs and I have one myself, but I cannot stand RSS readers because they ruin the layout of the blog. I really like the idea of an iCal thing that I could subscribe to. That would be very cool. I will probably only look to the Squid list for events on the web site until there is a more useable solution. Right now the email options are broken.
on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 8:48 am
I would love to see the background be white and the text black - studies prove people will stay longer on a site that is light color and black or dark text. Just a bit of feedback. :)