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:
-
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.
-
talks.cam provides personalized browsing and searching of the University-wide
database.
- 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.
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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; }