Wikevent:News 2007 8 22

It's been far too long since I've posted here, so I thought I would just to let you all know that I haven't been slacking off.

I have a couple of announcements. First of all, there is a new attribute for the event tag: tickets. It's meant to take a URL to any site which sells tickets to the event in question, and will display a little link in a blue box next to the price, language, etc.

Next, I've just fixed a long-standing Mediawiki bug which prevented the use of ampersands in article names. So now we can have articles with titles like .

This was an important thing to do because I've been writing a lot of scraper 'bots recently: at the moment I have 9 active venue bots. Of course given one per venue there's a lot of bot writing work to be done. So, in order to make it easier for perl coders to join us in trying to build our events I've tried to encapsulate a lot of the work that a Wikevent scraper bot does into two Perl modules which I'll upload to CPAN in the next day or so: WWW::Wikevent::Bot and WWW::Wikevent::Event.

Next up on my TODO list is a little cosmetic work on the search results pages, like this one. I've also got a couple of new features planned: One which will make it easy to "feature" an event (right now it's kindof hard, I do it with redirects), and another to easily add an event to Last.fm, so you can take advantage of all of their nifty social networking features.

Please everybody, don't hesitate to let me know if you want a feature, or want me to write a bot for a specific venue.

ciao!