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Next delicious load : tomorrow, same place, same time !

Over the past month or so I’ve been trying out the new Eventful service that I found out about on Tech Crunch. The idea behind Eventful is to allow people to connect with events, whether in their local area or further afield. Data is available on each event with separate sections for performers, venues, links and calendars. Eventful also lets people tag and comment on events. There is an API that will allow people to take events and put them on their own site as well as create mashups from Eventful data.

Dan Farber has just put up an interesting podcast with Eventful founder Brian Dear describing his goals and aims for the service.

So given that I have been trialling this for over a month how does it look? Well firstly I have to say that I am impressed with the features that Eventful provides, particularly the capability to upload images for all sections of the site. The other feature that I particularly like is the ability to add rich data about events, performers and venues including links to official or unofficial sites, pictures and comments. The calendar feature is adequate and the feeds available from the site do the job quite nicely. Compared to competitors like upcoming.org Eventful is a clear winner.

The other thing that you want from an event site is a good selection of events to choose from that in turn creates a good community adding and tagging events to go to. I have to say that for Adelaide where I live that upcoming.org does have the edge, particularly in live music. Hopefully that will change. Eventful have done a deal with meetup.com to add their meetups to eventful but apart from meetups there are only the events I have added in Adelaide. On the flipside Eventful does publish events to other sites when you add them (including upcoming.org) so you are not missing out on potential reach by listing your events there.

I do have to say that I have encountered a few bugs with the site, mostly around things not displaying correctly. I also encountered one problem with Eventful submitting events to other sites. Each time I dutifully submitted a bug report and had prompt attention from their tech support within a day or two, top marks for responsiveness. The only other gripe I have is that their group feature is not secure, anyone finding out the URL of your group can add events to it whether you want them to or not. If you use their API the URL of the group is sitting right there in the source of your page for anyone to see so this isn’t so good. I have assurances that this issue is on their list of things to fix. There are a few issues with Australian addresses which can be worked around if you remember to put your city or town in the city field and the suburb in the address body.

All in all I would reccommend Eventful to people, it has a load of great features and the bugs don’t detract from its usefulness too much, especially when you factor in responsive tech support.

If you’ve ever thought of yourself as an above average driver check this video out. I had my heart in my mouth at just about every moment expecting a crash but somehow there wan’t one. I’m sure there must be unwritten rules but I don’t think I’d last long driving wherever this is!.

Thanks go to Frank for sending this one to me.

Daily Links : 1 links from del.icio.us :

Next delicious load : tomorrow, same place, same time !

I added little icons to the categories so that the feeds were easier to get to. The icon is the one that both Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 have standardised on for feeds. I’ve also added a Bloglines subscribe link to have updates for the whole site automatically added to Bloglines.

I just downloaded the Google Web Toolkit which was announced at Java One this week to have a look at it (See this Java Posse Podcast for an interview with one of the lead developers). My first impression on reading the documentation was that the documentation was very basic and that there is a long way to go to understanding this technology. I have to say that the kitchen sink demo didn’t immediately fill me with excitement at the cool possibilities of the technology (like Open Rico did when I first saw it) but on the other hand I can see that there is some depth here, I might just have to dig a bit to find it.

The basic idea is that you can write code in Java and then have that code compiled into Javascript that will run on any browser, avoiding the issues of dealing with different browser quirks and, hopefully, making it easy for Java programmers to get into the world of AJAX (something that definitely appeals to me). Having the code written in Java comes with one advantage: you can use Java debugging tools to debug your page before you compile it. The toolkit comes with a couple of scripts that generate a sample application shell complete with a “Hello World” button and corresponding Eclipse project (is Google favoring Eclipse over NetBeans?). The code on first impressions looks like fairly standard swing component and listener code, albeit with different method names.

According to the podcast mentioned above you can hook in other javascript libraries to this code which might mean that Open Rico could be an option for controls. The other thing you can do is embed these applications in existing pages which opens up the possibility of integrating the Google Web Toolkit with Grails. Grails is very nice, the more I look at it the better it gets and hooking up a nice client side AJAX toolkit to it would be fabulous.

If you are thinking of doing some web development in the near future then the Google Web Toolkit is worth a look.

Tomorrow night at Life Group we are doing a DVD from the Nooma series called “Rain” and I just noticed that there is a free set of discussion questions on their site. Have a look if you are coming, they are good.

When you are a Christian like me you get used to things adding up, making sense. To those weird seemingly unrelated juxtapositions of life that suddenly resonate in ways that no one else can fathom except you, the things amidst everyday life that are the voice of God speaking to you.

At the beginning of 2004 I took a really big step for me, I gave up playing computer games. For me that was a big thing. They had been a part of my life in one way or another since I was a teenager. From waiting for 14 and a half minutes for beachhead to load from tape on a Commodore 64 to many hours playing Warcraft 3 I played nearly every day, and certainly every week I had access to a computer. I remember playing Civilization for 14 hours straight one night after being turned down when I asked someone on a date sometime in the early 90s. Two and a half years ago when Pastor Mark was talking about sacrifice I knew they had to go. The time they were taking and the sleep I was losing had to be put to better uses and there was only one way that was going to happen: cold turkey. I could have kidded myself that I could “just play for half an hour” one more time but I had failed so often I knew that was a lie. Goodbye, time to make a change, my focus needed to be on the things of God and games were robbing me of my destiny.

Yesterday I was talking to Gordo at work and the topic got around to the subject of games. As we were talking I could feel the allure, the attraction, the call. The desire to bury myself in pure mental calculation and shut out anything and everything in the world around me, to exist in the world of the game and nowhere else. It was strong, I could see it in myself, I remembered what it was like, it was attractive and, once again, I had to recognise the desire in myself and step back from the slope, the slide backwards away from my destiny.

Last night I went to the Thirty Something prayer meeting up at church (awesome prayer meeting BTW) and Pastor Mark was talking about being seduced away from God’s best. The slow drift that starts with a single step, not very far, towards the call of something other than God and away from Him, shutting out the sound of His voice for a moment, only a moment. The step that leads to another and another. We were praying for people who had begun that journey, that God would arrest that walk and make them realise just what was going on and what was happening.

Thinking about my conversation earlier in the day I realised that I am not so very far from starting that journey every day that I live in this fallen world, that I need to be attuned to the voice of my Father at every moment lest I stray from the narrow path laid out for me that leads to my eternity with Him.

My brother has some photos of the aftermath of the fire at St Barnabas Broadway up on his blog. These are a really amazing picture of what happened.

I saw this: Improve yourself with Mecanbe over at Tech Crunch and my first impression was WOW! I need that. There are a number of improvements I have been thnking about making in my life and the thought of having somewhere to track them as well as a group accountability method really appeals to me. I have, in the past, kept track of some of these things on my whiteboard but this looks like a much more full featured application.

I’ve signed up for the beta, it will be interesting to see how this pans out.