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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