I added a new feature to Rat’s Reading today. I go to a few author readings every month, but finding out when these happen is kind of a pain. The only relatively complete listing which I am aware of is at The Stranger. But that requires going to their web page and checking periodically. Which I forget to do, or forget how long it’s been since I last checked. Their book editor, Paul Constant, usually does a daily Slog posting with the readings of the day, with his recommendation. But by the time I get that, it’s noon the day of the event. Too late for me to make plans. Ideally, I want to know about these events a week or two in advance.
So today I added my own list of author readings and other events for Seattle to Rat’s Reading. With the addition of the Events Manager plugin for WordPress, I have a good base of code to manage these, so I’m hoping the maintenance won’t be too much. At this point, the site merely features a list of upcoming events, which I hope to keep up to date about a month in advance.
If that were all, it wouldn’t be worth it. But there’s a few features I plan to add as soon as I code them up: weekly posts of events added, weekly posts of events upcoming (i.e., Fridays, if that be the day, sees an auto-generated post with the following weeks events), an RSS subscriptions, and an iCal subscription (so events can be imported to Google Calendar or other time management app).
In any case, check out the listing and tell me what you think.
Dear Rat: A thousand thanks. Just got back from lunch at Musashi’s — where I could see by a poster on the wall that I had missed Kathleen Norris at Seattle U — complaining about how hard it is to find a calendar of the stuff I want to do in our city.
I wonder if you could monetize this by recommending the nearby happy hours where bookies might gather?