DC Tech Events (the blog)

It’s not going to win any awards for design or usability, but hey– here’s a draft of the event submission form.

I realize the “(really) Short Description” might seem kind of gimmicky– but hear me out.

In a previous iteration of the site, I used to feature hand-selected pull-quotes for certain events, which I liked in principle but was tedious and discriminatory in practice. I want to have short summaries of events to use on index pages, search results, Twitter, the newsletter, etc, but hate hate hate machine-generated excerpts. This seems like a fair compromise.

How best to enter dates and times is something I’ve been spending too much time on, but my mind rebels at the typical start date/ end date, start time / end time configuration of other event submission forms. Here are some examples at the ambiguity that bothers me:

This one might be obvious, but imagine:

Start: 1/26  8 am, End 1/29 5 pm

It’s pretty easy for a person reading it to guess that this probably means 8am – 5pm every day of the event, but it could also just as easily be interpreted as being every hour between 8am on the 26th and 5pm on the 29th.

It gets weirder if you add an irregular schedule, like:   Start: 1/23  7 pm, End 1/25 6 pm  (imagine a weekend event that starts with a Friday-night happy hour). What kind of algorithm or set of rules would you use to reasonably display that on a calendar?

My solution is to just make users define start and ending hours for every day of the event. No ambiguity there.

DC Tech Events Weekly will return January 5th.

Here’s my first crack at a system for categorizing types of tech events:

• User Group / Meetup

• Presentation / Talk

• Happy Hour / Party

• Discussion / Summit

• Project Collaboration / Open Lab

• Trade Show / Conference

I scrolled through the last few months of dctechevents.com and found nothing that I couldn’t shove in one of those boxes– but that doesn’t mean it’s complete or well thought-out. I’d love to hear what anyone else thinks.