Support Sched conferences better

[zuphilip]

Some conferences started to use https://sched.com/ for their program website, e.g. https://oat21.sched.com/?iframe=no . They provide also a ICS file which then can be used in giggity as well, e.g. https://oat21.sched.com/all.ics . However, this approach has some drawbacks:

• There is no line break in the description which makes them more or less impossible to read.
• Any additional HTML markup (bold, italics, enumeration) in the description of the talks/session is getting lost.
• The persons are not part of the ics file.

Would a direct support for Sched conferences in giggity be possible? I would assume that

1. the user can enter the sched website like https://oat21.sched.com/,
2. then the software knows where to look for the ics file +all.ics and create a giggity schedule from that
3. instead of using the description from the ics file, giggity can then go to each seperate event page (the URLs are part of the ics file) and grab the nicer formatted description as well as the person from that website, e.g. https://oat21.sched.com/event/3e892bad5fcace002664b28783802f05?iframe=no

My feeling is, that most of these is maybe easy to build with the things which are already coded here. However, I don't know the codebase and I am not experience to do anything with Java.

Could this suggested feature become part of giggity?

[Wilm0r]

Do they not have a native format like Pentabarf's XML/JSON? :-(

Hmm, actually, would this work, you think? https://sched.com/api#session-list

[zuphilip]

I feel that the Pentabarf standard is not very active and therefore maybe also nobody (?) is using it.

The API looks interesting, also I don't know how what exactly the output would then contain. Hopefully, it contains all the information we want.

However, one needs an API key and with the same key you can also delete and modify sessions or other data. Thus, this API key cannot be shared publicly. I don't see how the API can then work with giggity under these circumstances. Or do I miss something here?

[zuphilip]

FYI I asked the sched-people to include line breaks in the descriptions in the ics file.

[Wilm0r]

That definitely never hurts :-)

Shame that there isn't a read-only API of some sort? Could be solved by putting a proxy in between or something (I could include it in ggt.gaa.st), which could then just fetch and translate from Sched to Pentabarf. Another benefit: No need for Java.

I feel that the Pentabarf standard is not very active and therefore maybe also nobody (?) is using it.

It's pretty common, no? Pentabarf as a project is pretty dead indeed (AFAIK and last time I checked) but there are forks/rewrites, Frab and I think more. But still it's probably not that interesting to the sched.com folks, yes.