We’ve been busy at Zvents lately, mostly with building a bunch of cool new functionality to make our users happy. One of the neatest new things we’ve launched is an embeddable dynamic calendar which can be used on any website. If you’re reading this blog, you are no-doubt familiar with the blog calendar widget that we announced at our launch.

We’ve received a lot of requests from folks for a calendar object that was larger and useful in contexts beyond a blog sidebar, and so last week at the When 2.0 Conference at Stanford, we announced and demoed Zvents venue page or a Zvents group page and created versions that anyone can embed on their own website. We’ve put up some demo sites on Blogspot to show this functionality. Based on our ongoing work with some great folks up in Tacoma, here is an example venue calendar for the Tacoma Museum of Glass, and here is an example group calendar for the shared Tacoma Arts Calendar. We’re also able to build these against a saved search, as shown by this jazz music calendar for the SF Bay Area.

Some cool features of these calendars:
* Switch between 1-day, 3-day, week, and month views
* Scroll dynamically forward and backward in time
* Readers can get RSS feeds and ICal directly from the hosting page
* Mouseovers on the 30-day view show details for daily events

These calendars are a perfect way for venues, community organizations, bloggers with aspirations, and small media sites to quickly and easily create a never-empty, highly-relevant events calendar for their sites. We haven’t yet rolled the interface into Zvents.com so that you can create your own, but we’re happy to spend 10 minutes making one specially just for you if you contact us at business@zvents.com.

-Shane

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One of the aspects of Zvents that we’ve worked very hard on is its support for bloggers and media sites that want to embed events into their sites. This isn’t very easy to do today, and we wanted to make it far easier.

We have two main tools for blogging about events right now - the Zbutton and the Zvents embedded calendar

Every event detail and venue detail page on Zvents has an SHARE link at the top with an option to “Blog it.”  You find a snippet of html code.

In your blog or web site, simply paste in this code, and you will get Zbuttons linking to the page of the event or venue that you’re blogging about. The mouseover for the Zbutton will be descriptive of the event, for instance, “Check out ‘Fleet Week San Francisco - Blue Angels’ on Zvents.”

Even cooler than Zbuttons are our dynamic calendars. You can display calendars for a venue, a person, a group, or a tag. Below the calendar on any of these pages (My Zvents, or a venue, group, or tag detail page) you will see a sentence that reads, “Want to embed this [venue, tag, group, your] calendar on any web page or blog? Click here for instructions.”Clicking on the “instructions” link walks you through a set of direction that allow you to specify the height and width (in pixels) of the embedded calendar, and whether you want a daily, monthly, or list variant to appear.

As you specify these parameters, the html for the embedded iframe dynamically changes. Once you are happy with your choices, you can cut and past the resultant HTML into your blog or media site.

After you republish your site, the dynamic calendar will appear. It automatically defaults to showing today’s date, and can be scrolled by clicking on the left and right blue arrows. Clicking on any of the listed events takes the user to the Zvents site.

The readers of your blog or site can get the RSS feed or iCal for your embedded calendar directly from your site, without going to Zvents, by clicking on the RSS and iCal icons in the upper corners of the calendar.

We’ve set up the blog http://zventsbayarea.blogspot.com to showcase examples.

How to use the calendar - an example

If you want to create an itinerary or recommendations list, as is visible on the Zvents Bay Area blog, the simplest way to do it is to create a group, and add particular events that interest you to that group’s calendar. When you are happy with the set of included events, you can embed that group.s calendar on your blog or web site. This is how we created the calendar for the Zvents Bay Area blog - it maps to a group on Zvents called, not surprisingly, “Zvents Bay Area”.

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