We’d like to create a community-hosted calendar of User Group meetings so that people in your groups as well as people who want to join your groups can find out when and where the next meetings are.  We have chosen www.eventful.com to handle the hosting of our calendars.  We’ve chosen Eventful (formerly evdb.com) for many reasons:

• easy sign-up and a good (in Stefan and Chandana’s opinions) privacy policy
• easy to add your events with good richness (time, place, geo, venues, cost, etc)
• good support for “tagging” – tags are used to quickly search and find information
• full RSS support so you can get notifications directly in your RSS reader
• ability to easily create group calendars

 

To use Eventful, simply:

1)       go to www.eventful.com and create a user account

2)       click on “Add Event” on the right hand side of the screen

3)       fill in all relevant information, with some notable info (below):

a.       in “tags”, enter any tag you want, but also make sure you add “MSUserGroup” as one of your tags and add “MS User Groups” in the “Calendar” field

4)       Click “Add Event”

 

It’s that simple!  For those of you who use RSS Readers (like RSS Bandit or Feed Demon), you can now add the feed for “MSUserGroup” to your readers by adding this feed: http://eventful.com/rss/events?q=tag:MSUserGroup

 

You can see the beginning of how RSS syndication works by going to the home page http://winserver.sts.winisp.net and looking at the far right side.  It isn’t pretty – but you get the idea of the power.  What you will see here are all the events with the “msusergroup” tag associated with them.