Geodog

UC Berkeley News Center gets an RSS feed

For the first five years I lived in Berkeley, I might as well have lived in Turlock for all the contact I had with UC Berkeley. I lived my life in the tunnel zone of work, home and parenting, familiar to all working parents of small children. But last year, between fewer demands on the work front and the maturation of the youngest progeny, I finally emerged from that long tunnel, and resolved to begin making use of some of the resources available to me as someone who lives a mile away from the UC Berkeley campus. I began to attend seminars, took the progeny to Cal Day (highly recommended), and went and heard some of the many speakers who come to Cal every year (and wrote up my impressions of some of them).

I have friends who teach at UC Berkeley, and they tell me that it is a very feudal organization, and each department is a fiefdom unto itself. My experience as a virtual and actual visitor certainly bears (pun intended) that out. It is as true when it comes to putting on events as everything else. Departments bring in speakers with national and international reputations, from fields as different as medicine, journalism, and business, but all too often they are only publicized by flyers and word of mouth within those departments. I started trying to make a habit of checking the online calendars for the Journalism School, the Hass School of Business, the Goldman School of Public Policy, Boalt Law School, and the School of Public Health on a regular basis to scope out upcoming events. One quick survey of the calendars confirmed the feudal nature of the institution -- each department's calendar is created with a different vendor's tool and uses a different format, and the frequently and accuracy of updates varies widely. I couldn't even find anything that looked like a useful calender on the totally lame website of the department closest to my professional interests, that of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department.

In spite of my best intentions, I didn't check the calendars that frequently, and all too often I would only find out about a speaker or interesting conference after it happened. Then I discovered UC Berkeley's Critic's Choice Calendar, which does a reasonable job of publicizing events on campus likely to be of wide interest. I decided to put together my own Berkeley page on my personal portal, with events from UC Berkeley and local bookstores, headlines from local newspapers, weather forecasts, links, and headlines from my favorite Berkeley weblog writers.

To my surprise, none of the UC Berkeley websites, and none of the local newspapers had RSS feeds. So, in classic "scratch your own itch" fashion, I wrote my own PHP script to scrape websites and produce RSS feeds from them. I used that script to put together my personal Berkeley page, and also used it to add headlines to my somewhat moribund Berkeley Blog site.

One day I read that the Journalism school's web master, Scott Hacker, had actually created an RSS feed for J-School events. I wrote to Scott and asked him why UC Berkeley's main news site and calendar sites didn't have one, pointing him towards my site where I had RSS feeds displayed. He wrote back saying the reason was essentially one of budget, and asking if I would be willing to help the UC Berkeley NewsCenter create RSS feeds internally. Later, I was told that there had been a debate on the UC Berkeley webmaster's mailing list, with one group wanting to spank me for (alleged) copyright violation for creating the RSS feeds, and the other group wishing to thank me for my work and seek my assistance. The group seeking to thank me won out, and I agreed to help them, pro bono.

The irony of the UC Berkeley Public Relations office of a University that boasts it has the 3rd ranked engineering department in the country having to rely on the volunteer efforts of a self-taught scripter to help them create a simple, basic piece of software infrastructure like an RSS feed didn't seem to occur to anyone. Years of working in a feudal and balkanized environment, plus the last few years of budget cutting, followed by The Gropenator's latest assault on higher education, seem to have numbed everyone to the constraints they work under. It did occur to me, however the people I worked with were pleasant and extremely conscientious, and I was happy to have someone use my code and to repay Cal for all the wonderful speakers I have heard there, as well as all the smart young engineers I hired from there when I ran the Operating Systems division of Geoworks, located in Berkeley. So now the UC News Center has an RSS feed, and one should be coming soon for the UC Berkeley's Critic's Choice Calendar.

Next target in my RSS evangelizing: The Berkeley Daily Planet. I used my script to create an RSS feed for them for my own use, but I'd like to see them host one for everyone to use.