Syndicating Talks

If you simply want to subscribe to a talk, then this page may be of more interest to you. If you want to tweak how your talks listing looks in talks.cam, or include your talks listing in your own website, then read on. You may find reading the introductions linked at the top of this page useful, especially if you are new to talks.cam.

The information stored in the talks.cam database can be included automatically in other web pages. The idea is that seminar series organizers can automatically maintain up-to-date pages on their own website (and possibly on the website of other departments or groups) just by making a single change to the information in talks.cam . When viewing a list, if you click on ‘Further Detail’, you’ll get the opportunity to have the information presented in talks.cam delivered to you in a variety of ways.

Providing an alternative view of your talks listing

If you are the organizer of a seminar series that does not currently have a website, you can use a talks.cam URL as your seminar series homepage. We can offer you a variety of views of your list. You can choose whether to use the standard view of your list {click to see an example} or you might prefer a more minimalist look {click for example} or maybe you’d like the talks to be displayed in a table? Each of these examples simply uses a slightly different URL . You can experiment with the different URLs by going to your list, selecting ‘Further detail’, then selecting ‘Create Custom View’ to make the above links, I selected for option 2 ‘Laid out as a table’ and for option 3 ‘With a minimal header and footer’. As you change the options, the bottom of the page displays the appropriate URL for you to use. As a start, we recommend you try option 3 ‘With a minimal header and footer’. You can then mail this link to people who’re interested in your talk or list of talks.

Including content in other webpages

One of our main design aims was to make it easy to include content from a talks.cam list in another webpage.

If you want to arrange for an external webpage to receive up-to-date content automatically from talks.cam, you should go to the page within talks.cam for the list whose content you would like to syndicate. From that page, follow the “Further detail” link, then the “Create Custom view” link. Here, you can create a “view” of your list. You may wish to read the warnings about the security of embedding feeds in your site before including talks.cam content in your webpage.

How views work

There are many possible views you can get of your list of talks. For example, would you like a webpage that shows “all the talks this term”? Or would you like to include in an existing webpage a tiny little table that lists only the talks in the next 24 hours? All these views can be extracted by an appropriate URL . If you want to make lots of different views of the same list, don’t worry, that’s easy to do. When you go to the ‘Create Custom View’ link, you get to choose the settings of one view. At the foot of the page are instructions telling you what to do to obtain that view. Whenever you change what you want, the instructions are instantly updated. So if you want to create two views of a list, for inclusion in two different webpages, dial up the options for view number 1, then copy the instructions; dial up the options for view number 2, and copy the instructions again. Once you have copied the instructions for view number 1, don’t worry that your subsequent tinkerings with the ‘Create Custom View’ page might mess up view number 1! – All details of your view number 1 are safely stored in the instructions that you made a copy of.

Also see screenshots.

Once you have set up the view, the page will provide a fragment of html that should be included in your own webpage. Whenever anybody accesses your web page, the details of talks that they see will be automatically updated. This means that every visitor to your web page will see the most recent talks that have been syndicated from the talks.cam list.

If you’d like other people to include your content in their webpages, just send them the instructions that you got from the view-customizing page.

Back to talks.cam documentation