By request, MySpace Events RSS Creator does exactly what the name suggests, growing (completing?) the family of MySpace RSS creators here on Make Data Make Sense. As an added bonus, the events are marked up in hCalendar format, so they can be easily imported into various calendar applications. Please point out any problems or potential improvements in the comments here.
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9 Comments
Hey man,
very nice tool you have there for the comments pull on myspace. One thing I might suggest is to see if there is a way to ensure that the output is well formed. For example, I just his a site that had some img and br tags that weren’t closed.
Just an idea. great job.
The only means of ensuring well-formed output I know of is Tidy. I tested running the MySpace pages through Tidy before reading them, but there was too much lost content in the process.
If that lost content isn’t an issue in your case, you could still do that yourself using a Tidy proxy service. Except in a few cases, Tidy might remove content necessary to parse the page, in which case it would fail. I’m not sure how to improve that. Another option is to contact the MySpace user and ask them to clean up their HTML.
I noticed that this works on other profiles but not my cousin’s band at myspace.com/armyofgood1. I’m going to guess it must be from some additional layout code that they pasted in from some other site which is throwing it off.
In the profile page where it lists the upcoming shows, there is a link in the upper right corner of that box to “view all”. This takes you to a seperate URL for the friendID number which lists all the events the band has posted. Wouldn’t it make more sense for this MySpace Events RSS creator to pull its information from the “View all” events page, rather than the profile page? This way it isn’t loading all of the cluttered nonsense code that people have on their profiles and comments, and rather a just more consistent and simplified list of the events.
Of course you would need the FriendID, but that’s just a matter of going to one’s profile page and clicking “view all” events, and copying the resulting URL.
-Jeff
Jeff, the problem was with the “18 & Up,” which is invalid HTML. MySpace should be publishing that HTML as “18 & Up”, but MySpace is, as usual, broken, so I added a check for that and your cousin’s events are loading correctly now. Thanks for the note.
how about a version for myspace band calendar items?
tim, I’m using the events feed for band events. That was the primary reason for creating it. When you say “calendar items”, do you mean something else? If I may cross-plug a bit, you might be interested in Playing Here, a site I’ve made, focused entirely on concert schedules.
Great tool. Only have one problem. The feed ascends from new to old. Problem there is events in the future are on top of upcoming events. Anyone know how to change this? Please let me know.
I can get a nice RSS feed of my MySpace calendar, but trying to bring the URL into Google Calendar doesn’t display anything.
Matt, can Google Calendar import RSS feeds? I haven’t found any info about that.
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