I’ve been plugging away at improving the Modern Stories NYC Storytelling Calendar. Take five minutes to read this post. It will be worth your time, I promise.
Here’s what’s new and improved
It’s easier than ever to submit events, especially from on Facebook. If you’re not listing your events on Facebook and promoting them in the NYC Storytelling group then this is a great time to start. But you can also submit events the old way, via a form. Learn about how to submit your events here.
You can get alerts when new events are posted. Now you don’t have to come check the calendar for new events. The new events will come to you! How? There are two ways to find out about new events:
- The RSS Way: Add this link to your favorite RSS reader: http://modsto.com/modfeedbag
- The Email Way: Subscribe to the Modern Stories Feed Bag. It’s like getting an RSS feed right in your email inbox! In fact, that’s exactly what’s happening. Every new Modern Stories post is lovingly gathered and sent out (if there’s anything to send) in an email at 6AM sharp every day, rain or shine. Open, click, read, enjoy. If the emails get overwhelming I’ll look into also offering a weekly digest.
As always, your email and personal info will never be shared, sold or used for any other purpose than what you signed up for.
Your event now has a promotable, sharable web page. This is of negligible value if you’ve already got a Facebook event page, but it’s worth mentioning anyway: every Modern Stories event now has a companion stand-alone web page that you can send people to. Here’s an example of one. It has all the features of a calendar listing: show info, links, mapping, social sharing buttons, and the ability for users to add the event to an iCal or Google calendar. To get the page link for your event just subscribe to the RSS feed (see above) and look for your event’s URL there.
Events are now listed weekly. There are so many events that the calendar was getting out of control. So events are now listed by week on the home page. On the main calendar page they’re also listed by week, but below that is a 3-month view. All of the sorting capabilities are still there at the top of the calendar.
Donating has its rewards. My time is free, but fancy calendar plug-ins for WordPress are not. I’ve shelled out a few hundred dollars to create and improve upon the calendar since launching it in January. A couple of people have donated to help and I am grateful beyond belief for that. You’ll know who they are because their events are highlighted in the calendar in a lovely, eye-catching blue.
Would you also like your events to stand out like this? Donate just $20* and I’ll highlight your events for an entire year. Not only will everyone see your events, they’ll also see what a generous person you are.
On a separate, but somewhat related, note I’ve retired the Modern Stories Stuff newsletter. I didn’t have time to send it out regularly and at this point the RSS feeds will be fulfilling 90% of the reasons I started it. So if you were a subscriber I suggest that you subscribe to the RSS feed or to the Feed Bag so you keep getting stuff.
I’m still working on expanding the utility and reach of the calendar. As major improvements like this happen, I’ll post about them again.
*Or more. More would be great, actually.