some thoughts about these beautiful calendars.
a few weeks ago, a question was posted to the antville project weblog whether the assignment of dates (other than today's) could be implemented in antville.
i think this is a deliberate question and meanwhile (after some wondering) i totally disagree with the reply that such a feature would lead apart from the current weblog roadmap antville is going right now.
truth is, such story clones (they could be called "events") would improve weblogs in a direction many believe to be the knowledge managing future of this kind of publishing systems. and, furthermore, it would give these beautiful calenders a reasonable meaning and real power that could justify their existence.
i assume the programming of such calendars is quite a demanding task. just think about all these leap years and leap year exceptions! certainly i respect the very well-done results on the sites i spotted them.
however, for the purpose of browsing a weblog it is a concept – forgive me for being so harsh – close to non-sense. i think everyone who ever tried to reach beyond one or two months of postings back in to time or forth into the future will agree with me.
it appears to me as if these weblog calenders creepily sneaked into the blogger's world via userland's manila software resp. websites like editthispage.com, just to be adapted quite seam- and thoughtlessly (but nevertheless with all that effort) by well-meaning and innocent web developers into a bunch of similar weblog tools.
but still i never navigate weblogs in time using such a calendar. it never made sense to me. most of the time i directly jump on the frontpage or land somewhere amidst its postings using a link or a search engine (btw, a tool antville needs desperately, meanwhile). i never was right when i tried to remember how long ago this one posting was about yet another suse linux installation desaster, anyway...
they break a fly on the wheel.
nevertheless, i think i could consider a calendar useful to browse events that are close to the current date. events which do not have to be related to any of the current stories, e.g. because they are taking place in the future (like concerts, meetings, birthdays). i noticed that it often does not make any sense to blog an event which is further away than three to five days.
such postings get lost in time and most likely the event will be forgotten (if not recorded somewhere else, with a more appropriate tool). even if i would repeat my announcement three days later it becomes pretty redundant stuff and you have to have the time and still the memory to do it this way (the euroranch.org guys obviously have, btw, and they do it very well imho). personally, i do not feel able to and not really willing to, either.
that being written, i think i will venture the effort of implementing a new type of "event" posting that allows custom date input and hopefully transform the calendar into a more useful tool.
last words: the tv.orf.at calender works pretty well. at least for the current month.
update: i am curious what chris langreiter will invent one day to make time-based navigation usable...