Posting calendar events on your web sites

I’m in the midst of rebuilding the web site for the Orange County Heritage Coordinating Council, a non-profit local history organization on which I serve. I wanted to include a calendar of HCC events, as well as all Orange County local history events… but I didn’t want to have to compile and enter this all myself.

That’s when I remembered Zvents, the nation-wide events listing database that allows organizations and members of the community to post event listings, and allows users to search the listings by name, subject, keywords, venue, date, and locality. We used this service at The Orange County Register, and on all Freedom Communications web products.

Zvents provides a handy widget — as well as making their API available — to webmasters, so they can display customizable events calendars on their web sites, with content fed by the Zvents database.

For HCC, I created two Zvents groups: a moderated one for HCC events (only my group moderators can post events, to which we apply the tags “OCHCC”, as well as “Orange County” and “History”), and an unmoderated public group for Orange County History (anyone can join and post events). I can search all the events listings for keywords applicable to Orange County History, then save those searches in the public group… this automatically populates my group calendar and the widget on our web site. To populate the HCC events calendar, I filtered that group to only display events tagged with 3″OCHCC”.