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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Since our launch in early September, we’ve been busy behind the scenes rolling out new features and fixing bugs.

We’re fortunate enough to be running our site on Ruby on Rails which features an absolutely fantastic automated deployment framework. This allows us to deploy code changes easily, which means we have the luxury of pushing new code incrementally on a daily basis. As a result, the site has been gradually maturing over time and you may not have noticed some of the new features.

I thought I’d take this chance to go over some of the more significant new features that we’ve introduced since launch.

1. Repeating Events
When creating events you can now quickly and easily enter an entire series of events using a wide variety of recurrent patterns. If the need ever arises, it’s also easy to extend, edit or delete the entire series.

2. Saved Venue Calendars
Now it’s easy to keep track of what’s going on at your favorite venues by saving a venue calendar. Take a look at my event calendar. Notice that the calendars for “Slim’s” and “Bottom of the Hill”, two great music venues in San Francisco, can be easily seen just by clicking on the venue name next to the calendar on my home page. If you’re logged into your Zvents account, saving a venue calendar is as easy as clicking on the “add venue to my calendar” button when you’re looking at the venue page.

3. Embedded calendars can have a fixed date
Thanks to all those people that started embedding our calendars on their web sites and blogs. In the process, we learned that people didn’t use embedded calendars just to display their upcoming events, but also wanted to use them to refer to calendars of events in the past. So, now we’ve added the ability to specify a default date for embedded calendars.

4. Radius searches
When you search for something in “San Francisco”, we actually search all events within a 10-mile radius of the center of San Francisco. Previously, you had no control over the size of the radius. What if you only wanted to search for events within 1-mile of a specific address? Well, you were out of luck… until now. The search bar now lets you specify the radius for all searches.

5. Changes to month-view calendar
The vast majority of venues host only 1 or 2 venues every day. Now the 30-day view of the calendar shows the actual events occurring on each as long as there are only 1 or 2. Have a look at the calendar for Slim’s. If there are more than 2 events on a day, we simply show the event count. You can hover over the event count to get a tooltip with more details, or simply click on the event count to get the full listing for a particular day.

6. Shared/Collaborative Event Edits
In the past, only the creator of an event was able to change the event details. But we’ve found that many events are managed by a more than one person. When creating events you can now enter a list of users (or a list of groups) that are allowed to edit an event.

7. Back button fixes
Like many new AJAX applications, Zvents was causing the back button in the browser to behave unexpectedly. Since AJAX applications dynamically update only a portion of a page, rather than refreshing the entire page, use of the browser back button can be confusing. We’ve deployed changes that make the back button work in about 95% of use cases, and will be cleaning up the rest soon. We’re almost at the point where it just works as expected for everyone.

8. Safari support
Apple just had to be different. That’s okay. It took us some time, but with just a couple small exceptions, Safari is now supported throughout the site.

Check back here soon – we’ll be posting more frequently on new feature additions. And thanks for using Zvents!

-Shane

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