In case Linden Lab are wondering why my server was making a rather large amount of hits to the google appliance (as I’ve mentioned to Rob before) over the last couple of days, it’s because I’ve been working on “fixing” how their data is presented.
As you may have noticed, the Domesday Book renders profiles as hCards. The profile widgets in the Domesday book now pull the events from Linden Lab’s google appliance, outputting them as they should be- marked up using hCalendar. Both the Main Grid & Teen Grid Office Hours are also pulled from the wiki, but due to an apparent bug with the MediaWiki installation, Office Hours aren’t yet rendered as hCalendar.
I’ve also published the next 24 hours worth of cached events as hCalendar, RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0 and iCal feeds. The iCal feed seems to be unable to be parsed by Google, but works fine in Thunderbird’s Lightning extension, so if you’re wanting to use the feed on Google calendars, try using the Technorati’s conversion of the hCalendar feed. Also, the feeds currently lack full location data as I’m still experimenting with the parcel scraping code.
Why I’m scraping Linden Lab’s google appliance instead of using Eventful
Some of Second Life’s events are published through Eventful.com. I stress the some. I’ve also never been satisfied with how Linden Lab utilise the eventful.com API- adding the event organizer as a tag as opposed to an eventful performer for example.
However, I have been told by Linden Lab that the reason for this rather lacklustre implementation is because Eventful.com would’ve object to a full and complete implementation- think about how many Residents there are in Second Life (close to 11.5 million Residents at the time of writing), how many parcels & regions there are in Second Life. Now imagine how Eventful.com’s developers would feel if their database was blasted with the full force of all that data going in and out.
As always, I do know how to fix that issue (and I hope to be getting it implemented regardless of whether I’m hired by Linden Lab to do it). Expect to see me resurrect one of my on-hiatus projects and attach it to MN:SL so everyone can use it.
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