Philadelphia Reflections

Philadelphia Calendars

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As life becomes more cluttered, its time to keep track of what is important. Here is our approach.

We're trying something new; let's explain it. You can learn when you can hear this magnificent orchestra from our calendar.

Look down the left column of the home page of Philadelphia Reflections, and click on a box called "Philadelphia Calendars." (It's about the 12th one down). In time, the screen will display a list of group activities, like Music, or Sports, or Computer Discussion Groups, or whatever. Clicking one will display a list of activities. If there are enough activities, we may have to go to the third row of choices.

At the moment, we start with the Philadelphia Orchestra concerts. Click that choice, and you get a year's calendar, marked with what is presently known about the schedule. If you wish, you can drag the calendar to your desktop, dropping it there. In the URL box, there's usually a tiny icon to the left of the text. (It's meant for dragging purposes and called a Favorite-Icon, or FaviconThe Kimmel Center.

So, if you want to know what's at the Kimmel Center for some date, what time it starts, or who the soloist is, you can find it in this nook of Philadelphia Reflections. Frequent fliers in the music world can even have their own calendar on their own website, by dragging the Favicon. We hope to attract many such calendars, and it would be just fine to have local field hockey schedules, local poetry readings, etc. Just so it's located from Trenton to lower Delaware, the area once known as the Quaker colonies, now called the Philadelphia region. Why not just print it out? You can do this, but you lose any last-minute updates provided by the calendar creator, and that's one of the great features of Internet communication.).

To pull this off, several components must be assembled:

1. The calendar creator, the secretary, or executive office of the sponsoring organization, must either have iCal (free for Apple users), Outlook (about $100 for PC users and at a 60% discount at some online stores), or the Mozilla calendar available for both Macintosh and PCs. Users, however, only need normal Internet access. If you create one, you are responsible for the accuracy of the calendar.

2. The calendar server is a computer that holds the master copy of the calendar, and it really should be running night and day, every day. Both iCal and Outlook can make such an arrangement. The server can be anywhere in the world.

3. The calendar clearing house, Philadelphia Reflections, in this case, offers a defined selection from the millions of potential calendars in the world. Our selection merely claims to be local to Philadelphia, nothing more.

4. The end-user. Just what the user does with the information is rapidly evolving. The software is changing, getting more convenient every day. We'll comment from time to time, passing on suggestions as clever folks perfect them.

Oh, yes, one more thing. If you want to post a calendar with us, click the button on the front page, called "Contact us." It's a self-addressed e-mail. Rate this "Reflection" Printer-Friendly Format E-mail to a Friend

Originally published: Tuesday, June 27, 2006; most-recently modified: Friday, May 31, 2019