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About talks.cam

Are you a seminar organizer? Do you maintain a webpage that lists upcoming talks, seminars, or journal clubs? Then talks.cam is for you.

At talks.cam, you can create your own series (one or more series, as you wish); you, the other managers of your series, and the speakers themselves can enter the content into the series database at talks.cam; and talks.cam automatically serves up live, up-to-date content into your webpages, using listings -- not only your webpages, but into lots of other people's webpages too, because your series content will now be automatically advertised to everyone who is interested. (Other people can add your series to their listings.) talks.cam integrates seamlessly into your existing websites (See this page for an example where the talk content comes from talks.cam.) Or if you would like to have a series website created for you by talks.cam, we can do that too (as shown by this example).

If this isn't enough to convince you that you should switch over your seminar list management to talks.cam, here are some additional features:

  1. talks.cam will automate the task of communicating with the speaker, asking for his/her title and abstract, and ensuring that all websites are immediately updated when that information is provided.
  2. talks.cam provides personalized browsing and searching of the University-wide database.
  3. in the next planned version, talks.cam will also handle the task of sending email announcements of talks to people who want to receive emails.

Examples

Pages in which embedded content is delivered live by talks.cam
Pages entirely generated by talks.cam
Website managers may be interested in viewing the source of the above pages to see how simple they are.


How our talks listings are generated

Our talks listings (on for example our home page) are generated automatically by a talks-listing service created by Phil Cowans, in collaboration with Alan Blackwell, Duncan Simpson, and David MacKay, with support from Cambridge University Research Exchange (CURE).

To get the content included, all that I need to put in the webpage is this

 <script language="javascript"
src="http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talks/external/embed_feed.php?id=1"></script>

plus, to get the `look' delivered too, I add the following rules to my style sheet:

.talklist_date{ background-color: #dddddd; font-weight: bold; }
.talklist_header{ font-weight: bold; }
.talklist_entry{ }
.talklist_block{ clear: right; }
.talklist_block_small{ font-size: 0.8em; }
.talklist_date_small{ background-color: #dddddd; font-weight: bold; }
.talklist_header_small{ font-weight: bold; }

The content of our series database is managed by our talk series organizer through a nice web interface.

To get the content in the smaller box on the group home page, I used:

 <script language="javascript"
src="http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talks/external/embed_feed.php?id=30&suffix=small"></script>

Alternatively you can use this style sheet
.talklist_date{ border-top-style: dashed; border-bottom-style: dashed;
border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-width: 1px;
border-color: #cccccc; margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left:
16px; }
.talklist_week{ border-top-style: solid; border-bottom-style: solid;
border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-width: 2px;
border-color: #cccccc; margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-weight:
bold; }
.talklist_header{ font-weight: bold; }
.talklist_speaker{ font-style: italic; }
.talklist_entry{ margin-bottom: 16px; margin-left: 32px; }
which will make it look like this.

Here is Mike Roses' style-sheet cocktail:


.talklist_entry{ }
.talklist_block{ clear: right; }
.talklist_block_small{ font-size: 0.8em; }
.talklist_date_small{ background-color: #dddddd; font-weight: bold; }
.talklist_header_small{ font-weight: bold; }
.talklist_date{ border-top-style: dashed; border-bottom-style: dashed;
border-le
ft-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-width: 1px; border-color:
#cccc
cc; margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: 16px; font-weight:
bold; }
.talklist_week{ border-top-style: solid; border-bottom-style: solid;
border-left
-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-width: 2px; border-color:
#cccccc
; margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-weight: bold; }
.talklist_header{ font-weight: bold; }
.talklist_speaker{ font-style: italic; }
.talklist_entry{ margin-bottom: 16px; margin-left: 32px; }


The Inference Group is supported by the Gatsby Foundation
and by a partnership award from IBM Zurich Research Laboratory
David J.C. MacKay
Site last modified Fri Oct 24 11:49:02 BST 2014