Community Megaphone is a great site that Andrew Duthie put together.
Recently, the site has gone national and Andrew has been working hard at improving it.
His latest feature: geocoded RSS, which Glen Gordon put to good use by making an app that find developer events nearest you based on your location.
Here's my addition to the CM utility kit: a Plug-in for Windows Live Writer.
The plug-in adds an entry onto WLW's sidebar and Insert menu:
Once you click on "Insert CM Event," this dialog box comes up:
Browse to Community Megaphone to see the EventID the site assigned to the event you wish to blog about and enter that number in the text box.
Click OK and you'll see the following added to your blog post:
For instance, CMAP's August 2008 meeting has an EventID of 320, so if I plug in 320 to the dialog box, I get:
[ Event Details | Map | Add to Calendar ]
Future versions of the plug-in will eliminate the "browse to Community Megaphone site" step.
But for now, this is a fast and easy way to provide a link to a map and iCal file for events.
Installation
First download the DLL file download version 1.0.0.0 of the DLL and copy it to the C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins directory, assuming it's installed in the default directory.
Make adjustments if you've installed it in another location.
Let me know what you think!
Send bug reports, feature suggestions, gratuitous praise, etc to me via my contact page.