Hopefully this is an applicable place to discuss this.
I've just started looking into RSS/Atom/etc (news feeds in XML), and everything is going pretty well, but I'm working on a website for a band, and the news feeds seem easy enough, but I'm interested in the possibility of using RSS or Atom for calendar events (shows and tours).
But I'm not sure RSS/Atom can be used in this way.
The theory behind shows for a band is that they need to be advertised/shown UPTO the date of the event, then they're irrelevant. The theory behind news readers is that once you've read something, it no longer exists, which is not what I'm aiming for of course.
RSS2.0 only seems to have a published date, not an expiry date, so that doesn't seem to help.
Atom seems to have issued and modified, but again no expiry.
So, how can I take advantage of RSS/Atom/etc to keep fans up-to-date with shows/tours? Some ideas I have:
a) when a show is added/edited/deleted from the show database, a news item is created advising of the new/revised/deleted show, which would of course appear in the news feed. The advantage here is that there's multiple news items which can be tracked. The disadvantage is that shows won't appear in date order (or reverse date order) -- they'll simply be added to the feed as things change.
b) a news feed of *just one item* containing a summary of all upcoming gigs is offered over RSS/Atom... as the gig database changes, this news item is either *modified*, or *over-written* with a new summary... the advantage here is that the summary will be ordered correctly, and the latest (and only) news post will contain all the information in one hit.
Any other ideas?
--- Justin French http://indent.com.au
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