Submitted by Michael_MD on 19 April, 2010 - 00:58.
Tips for event promoters with websites:
If you are going to publish public events on your own website make your markup meaningful! ... make it clear to both machines and humans what is what... - use this: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar anywhere you publish your events.
... or post your events somewhere that does it for you.
Event listings on spraci.com are marked up in hCalendar (they have been for years), and spraci's feed aggregator can read hCalendar
For spraci listings you should also specity what city it is in - use "geo" and "hCard" under "location".
To specify music genres and other categories you can use "rel-tag" .
If you want to get an idea who is publishing hCalendar and other microformats (lots of sites are these days!) - get "Operator" for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4106
Another tip: avoid using timezones - support for them in software is unreliable and due to constant misuse of timezones (especially "Z" - meaning zulu/utc) data with timezones might be rejected by some tools or result in wrong dates - to be safe use "floating dates". Also avoid marking up anything as "recurring events" because that is not widely supported in software.
If you want more people to find out about your public events - share your data and make it easy for people to share!
and hey .. (stating the obvious) .... even in the "human readable" stuff NEVER use ambiguous date formats and NEVER omit the year! (remember that a web page is NOT a pole poster - you are not trying to squeeze it in the biggest font-size to get seen from a passing car! - abbreviating event dates on websites is just asking for trouble. Can you be sure that everyone looking at it at ANY time in the future can work out what year or month you mean) Ambiguous dates can confuse humans just as much as machines!
