Thank you for your interest in publishing your calendar information with Flogs.com.

This document explains how you can direct more traffic to your website, and be of added service to your visitors by offering calendar and event information directly into their digital calendars.

After fulfilling the steps outlined in this Flogs RSS Manual, you can publish your calendar and event information to all supported organizer applications and services, such as Microsoft Office Outlook, Google Calendar, Windows Vista Agenda, Apple OS X iCal, and different types of mobile phones — all simply by using Flogs.

Flogs uses the RSS2.0 format for publishing calendars. The RSS format is primarily used for publishing news items; the format however allows adding extra information to these items, such as locations, and start and end times. By adding this information, events can be expressed in RSS as if they were extensive news items.

This document assumes basic knowledge of RSS, including experience with publishing an RSS feed. This document does therefore not go into the basics of RSS, but only covers extending RSS to describe calendars. For more extensive information on RSS, please consult an online introduction available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Really_Simple_Syndication, or the specification which is available at http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification.

Basic RSS2.0

Below is an example of a basic RSS2.0 file (See Code Example 1). The tags title and description inside the channel tag are used within Flogs for the name and description of the calendar respectively. The marked tags title, link and description inside the item tag are used in Flogs for place of the name, link and description of an event. In order to generate traffic to your website via Flogs, the links should refer to the appropriate pages on your site. For each event there is exactly one item tag.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>DJGuide Party calendar (Amsterdam)</title>
    <link>http://www.djguide.nl/amsterdam</link>

    <description>
      The party guide for Amsterdam and surrounding areas, brought
      to you by DJGuide.nl
    </description>

    <item>
     <title>New Years Party</title>
     <link>http://www.djguide.nl/parties/id?1234</link>
     <description>New Years Party at Dam Square</description>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>
     

RSS2.0 with added calendar information

The example below shows the RSS2.0 code extended with Flogs.com calendar information tags.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss xmlns:f="http://flogs.nl/ns/1.0" version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>DJGuide Party calendar (Amsterdam)</title>
    <link>http://www.djguide.nl/amsterdam</link>

    <f:calendar_uid>djguide-amsterdam</f:calendar_uid>

    <description>
      The party guide for Amsterdam and surrounding areas, brought
      to you by DJGuide.nl
    </description>

    <item>
      <title>New Years Party</title>
      <link>http://www.djguide.nl/parties/id?1234</link>

      <description>New Years Party at Dam Square</description>
      <f:start>2008-12-31T22:00:00+0100</f:start>
      <f:end>2009-01-01T10:00:00+0100</f:end>
      <f:allday>false</f:allday>

      <f:location>
        <f:venue_name>Dam Square</f:venue_name>
        <f:city>Amsterdam</f:city>
        <f:zip>1071KS</f:zip>

        <f:country>NL</f:country>
        <f:region>Noord-Holland</f:region>
        <f:street>Jacob Obrechtplein</f:street>
        <f:number>3</f:number>

        <f:extension>floor 8</f:extension>
        <f:latitude>4.9338077</f:latitude>
        <f:longitude>52.3354479</f:longitude>
        <f:accuracy>5</f:accuracy>
      </f:location>

      <f:guid>djguide-1234-1</f:guid>

      <f:label name="event_property">Event property value</f:label>
    </item>

    <f:label name="organisor">Acme Events Ltd.</f:label>
    <f:label name="property_name">value</f:label>

  </channel>
</rss>
     

Event related tags: the ‘What’-part

title (required)

Defines the name of an event. Most calendar services do not fully display events titles longer than 32 characters. This is a standard RSS2.0 tag, and does not require the xml namespace prefix ('f').

guid (required)

A unique string to identify an event. Should the event be relocated, rescheduled and/or renamed, then the GUID of the event remains unchanged, allowing the event to be recognised. Only with a valid GUID are changes to events correctly updateable into your visitors’ calendars.

description (optional)

Defines a more elaborate description of an event. This is a standard RSS2.0 tag, and does not require the xml namespace prefix ('f').

link (optional)

An url to be included with the event. This is a standard RSS2.0 tag, and does not require the xml namespace prefix ('f').

Event related tags: the ‘When’-part

start (required)

the starting date and time of the event, expressed in ISO 8601 format.

ISO 8601
For any date, the ISO 8601 full format always describes the date, time, and time zone of the event, and uses the format: yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:sszzzzz.
For example, state 2012-04-30T16:15:00+0100 for April 30th, 2012, quarter past four in the afternoon, in the time zone of GMT+0100. Please be mindful of the zero-padding of date part values less than 10, i.e. April is correctly expressed as ‘04’, not ‘4’.

end (optional, default: value of start)

The end date and time of the event, expressed in the ISO8601 format. If this tag is not given, the end date is assumed to be equal to the the start date and the event is regarded as an all day event (see next paragraph).

allday (optional, default: false)

Either true or false, this field signifies whether an event takes the entire day(s), such as in the case of holidays and birthdays. If true, the time component (hour, minute and second) of the values given for ‘start’ and ‘end’ are ignored.

Event related tags: the ‘Where’-part

location (optional)

The location is where the event takes place. The location of an event is indicated with several optional fields. When visitors use the Flogs site, they can find your events based on their proximity; for example, all events within a 3-mile radius of a certain postal code or within walking distance of the position indicated by a GPS-enabled phone.

To allow your visitors to find your events based on location, Flogs requires knowledge of the geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) of the location.

Flogs calculates these geographical coordinates for you, if you provide at minimum the country, city and street, or country and zip code information. Alternatively, you can also fill out the fields of longitude and latitude, should you have this information available.

Calendar related tags

title (required)

Defines the name of the calendar. Limited to 64 characters. This is a standard RSS2.0 tag, and does not require the xml namespace prefix ('f').

calendar_uid (optional)

A unique calendar identifier. If not defined, the RSS url is used. Should you move the RSS on your webserver, set the calendar_uid to the original url to ensure continued correct updating of your calendar.

description (optional)

Defines the description of the calendar. Limited to 1024 characters. This is a standard RSS2.0 tag, and does not require the xml namespace prefix ('f').

link (optional)

An url to be included with the event. This is a standard RSS2.0 tag, and does not require the xml namespace prefix ('f').

label (optional)

Labels can be used to specify custom calendar properties. Label tags have no effect unless they are part of your agreement with Flogs.

The Flogs Namespace

It is important to indicate the use of the Flogs namespace correctly in the RSS code. This is expressed by an namespace prefix, preceding all tags from the Flogs RSS extension to prevent conflicts with extensions of other services. In the examples the namespace prefix is ‘f'. This is defined by the highlighted xmlns attribute in code listing two (xmlns:f="http://flogs.nl/ns/1.0").

Error handling

Incorrectly formed events will be ignored by the Flogs service during import. If desired, Flogs can automatically notify you of incorrectly formed events.

Help & Support

For help with questions regarding this document or creating your Flogs RSS, please contact Flogs Support.