Adding timezones into Upcoming feeds

Adding timezones into

your Upcoming feedMatt Harris

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ProblemUpcoming doesn’t know about timezones

Their events are “floating”

Different timezone events show as the same timezone in your calendar

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Solution

Add a timezone to the event ... but how?

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What do we have?Start date, end date, start time, end time

problem: their floating times

longitude/latitudeBad, not actually used

Country code Good, but what about multi-timezone countries

City OK, but it was entered as free text

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Example Feed { "venue_country_code":"uk", "venue_zip":"SW1P 3NZ", "status":"watch", "end_time":"17:00:00", "venue_state_code":"london", "latitude":"", "personal":"0", "id":"449191", "start_date":"2008-09-15", "geocoding_ambiguous":"", "venue_city":"London", "longitude":"", "venue_country_name":"United Kingdom", "name":"@media Ajax", "start_time":"09:00:00", "geocoding_precision":"", "description":"After a hugely successful, ....",

"venue_state_name":"England", "username":"adactio", "tags":"", "metro_id":"49", "venue_id":"69299", "end_date":"2008-09-16", "venue_phone":"020 7390 1590", "user_id":"81213", "venue_address":"Dean's Yard, Westminster", "venue_name":"Church House ... ", "venue_state_id":"59", "venue_country_id":"6", "venue_url":"http:\/\/url\/", "title":"" },

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Finding the timezoneCouple of providers with APIs

GeonamesGoogleYahoo Location Extractor

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Converting to a Timezonehttp://www.geonames.org

Good set of web service methodsDocumentation helpfulVarious response formats

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ProcessExtract City and Country from

Upcoming Feed

SEARCH for city and country code on GeoNames

Extract Longitude and Latitude from GeoNames response

RETRIEVE timezone from GeoNames

Inject into Upcoming feed

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Considerations

Time of response - caching?

Frequency of change, how do we keep this up to date?

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Step up Yahoo Pipes

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Further Infohttp://www.themattharris.com

http://pipes.yahoo.com/themattharris/

upcomingusergetwatchlist

Thanks also to Kent Brewster, Yahoo Inc for Pipes help

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