About Community Megaphone
Community Megaphone was built by Microsoft Developer Evangelist G. Andrew
Duthie (aka
.NET DEvHammer) to facilitate sharing and discovery
of events relating to software development.
The site is designed to provide an easy way to
add
events, without needing to sign up, register, or provide personal
information, and easily share information about upcoming events via the web,
RSS, and a
customizable gadget that can be added to any website. Community
Megaphone also provides integration with Outlook via iCal support, as well as
mapping of event locations via Virtual Earth.
FAQs
Q: What kind of events can I add to Community Megaphone?
A: As the name suggests, Community Megaphone is primarily intended to support
community events run by the developer community. Code Camps, user groups,
webcasts, and other free events are all welcome and encouraged. You may submit
paid/fee events, but we reserve the right to limit commercial postings in favor
of community-run free events.
Q: Do I need to register to use Community Megaphone?
A: No, simply click the
Add Event link, and fill out the form with your
event's information. The event will be queued for approval by the administrator
responsible for the state in which your event will take place. This is to
prevent spam or inappropriate postings, and to ensure accuracy of address and
mapping information.
If you wish, you may register in order to take advantage of the Community Megaphone API, which provides the
ability to add, update, and delete your own events via web services. Find out more on the
API page.
Q: What do I do if I need to cancel or reschedule an event?
A: Contact us,
and we'll update or remove the event listing, as appropriate.
Q: How can I keep up-to-date on events as they're added?
A: You can subscribe to our
RSS feed, or
follow Community Megaphone on Twitter. Additionally, you can
try our
Community Megaphone Data Service, based on
WCF Data Services.
Q: Your feed is breaking my feed reader!
A: Technically, that's not a question. That said, at Community Megaphone, we strive for the highest possible
compatibility with the widest array of browsers and feed readers. To accomplish this, we test our feed against the
W3C feed validation service, and our feed validates. We have, however, recently modified how we apply dates to the
items in our feed, in order to facilitate sorting the by the date the event occurs, rather than the date the event
was added to the system.
If this causes problems with your feed reader, you can simply add the querystring
argument DateSort=pubDate to the feed address, or just
click
here for the feed sorted by the date events were published.
Credits