Methods for Managing your Schedule

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The beginnings of a project on developing tools that will provide simple ways of building your schedule without having to do all the work manually.
 

Current ideas being tossed around:

  • Website scraping to produce data from places like: delta, orbitz, hotels, evite, ups, amazon, credit cards, orkut birthdays.  Perhaps even sites of little direct personal interest could have a means to schedule from: concert venues
  • Email scraping: like websites, we receive many emails with good information (and structured) information that could be useful in a schedule.
  • Active scraping: an external service, a system on your machine to scrap
  • Passive scraping: scrap when you view a page or email.
  • Intelligent scraping: instant messages, comments that are unstructured.  This one would be hard and likely not a good starting point.
  • Schedule views:  There are events that are of varying importance.  Sometimes I just want to see my travel schedule and sometimes I want to see the Atlanta Thrashers hockey schedule (and since I’m lazy I want to do this all from the same calendar).
  • Todo lists: some calendar items are due dates or perhaps not calendar items but instead tasks.  I nice way to manage these would be good.
  • Dynamic entries.  If I am looking into the past at the Thrasher’s home schedule, I should be able to get the score and info about the game.  Perhaps there should be an alert system when a schedule item has been changed at the source.
  • Templated Entries.  If I am looking at a travel entry booked at delta.com, I should be able to either get more details by drilling down deeping into my calendar or by having a templated link to go to delta.com and show my itinerary.
  • Event feeds.  You should be able to get feeds that are both of personal interest and general interest.  If you login to atlhack, you should be able to get a feed representing all the iCal events you are going to (perhaps you actually want all the atlhack events so the dynamic feature kicks in and you can look into the past to get the meeting notes 🙂 Also, some sites should provide event calendars so you can have things like "the high museam" view in your calendar to get an integrated exhibit schedule.

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