Perfect Duluth Day is launching an events calendar, and for the next month or so you can preview it at it’s permanent URL:
We have created this calendar because a majority of posts to the PDD Blog are about events, but the format of a blog is not a practical way to organize that type of information. If you wanted to know what’s happening today based on PDD posts, you’d have to select the “events” category and skim through weeks of random items looking for today’s date. That is lame.
So today our calendar is born. It doesn’t have a ton of events in it yet, and it probably has some technical issues left to be fixed, but the general format is set and it has seemed to be working well during our initial testing phase.
Check it out and tell us what you think with a comment to this post or an e-mail to calendar @ perfectduluthday.com.
We’re going to intentionally not give you a tutorial because we’d like to hear from you about whether it works well intuitively or if there’s a learning curve to using it.
Props to our tech nerd Cory Fechner, who programmed the calendar. It is not a WordPress plugin or a customization of some other existing program. It was built by Cory to do exactly what we want it to do — so we can even make changes to how it works without sorting through code written in German! On the other hand, it’s also not something that’s been used by thousands of people and tweaked over several years. It’s new and likely to have flaws our inner circle hasn’t noticed — and probably some data entry errors. So let us know what’s messed up, yo.
We’ll be working to add more events to the calendar, and there are two ways you can help with that:
1) Submit an Event using our verbose-but-hopefully-not-too-complicated form.
2) Spread the word about our job opening for a calendar editor. We’re going to need help to do this right.
We’ll take your questions as they come, but we imagine your first one will be: “Can I still post about events in the blog?” The answer for now is yes, but we intend to modify our blog policies in a month or so when the calendar hits its stride, and at that time we won’t totally outlaw event posts, but we’ll have some conditions set to keep the blog and calendar from being redundant.
We see the calendar as an opportunity to improve the blog by allowing hot posts to hang on the home page longer instead of being driven off by eight different announcements a day about public meetings, rock concerts, yoga classes and 5k runs. We’ll have a proper place for those things now.
Once the calendar editor is on board, it’ll be part of that job to post on the blog about highlights to the week’s events, so there will still be chances to comment on events occasionally. Also, as previously mentioned, event posts on the blog won’t be totally outlawed, so it will still be acceptable to post important event-related items from time to time — give us a month to brush up our policy on that.
Now stop reading this and poke around the calendar already. Just make sure you don’t go to so many events that you stop playing on the Internet. If you do that this whole thing will fall apart.