Local Garden Calendars for Blogs

When I taught you about RSS, I used the event calendar from Landscapedia to show you how to add a garden events calendar to your blog. That's great if you run a blog without a geographic focus. What about those blogs that focus just on a specific locale?

I'm going to show you a quick way to filter events so that you only get the ones for your location (and I'm going to try to do it without slipping into marketing speak trumpeting the virtues of Landscapedia).

First, go to Landscapedia's Event Calendar (http://www.landscapedia.info/events.php). In the top right corner, you'll see a search box where you can filter events by date or location. Look at the image on the right. You can filter by any or all of these fields. That means each of the fields is optional so you can put in your state abbreviation (for example, LA) and leave the rest blank.

Now, here's an interesting tip about the postal code. You can actually get events for a larger area if you leave off the last numbers of the zip code. For example, my zip code is 70119. If I use 701 in the postal code field, I get all events for gardens and organizations whose postal code is 701__.

So once you've entered your location, click Search to get the filtered results.

Do you see the RSS symbol at the top of the search box? After you filter your results, you can copy the RSS URL to get the custom feed for that location.

Now just follow the normal RSS routines outlined in the RSS Primer to add just those events for your location.  Pretty cool, huh?