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Schedule planner now available

Thanks to Doug Napoleone's work, the PyCon schedule planner is back this year.
You can use it to lay out your conference ahead of time: click on events and talks you'd like to attend, and then export your selected events in iCal format or print a customized schedule.
Your choices are saved on the PyCon server, and the organizers can see a summary of the popularity of each event. This lets us compare the popularity of various talks. At last year's PyCon, we swapped a few room assignments when a talk scheduled for a smaller room proved unexpectedly popular; I bet we'll do the same this year, too.
Known bug: the popups don't work with Safari 3.0.4 on Leopard; bug #247 describes the problem.

Comments

Doug Napoleone said…
NOTE: one person has lost their schedule after logging out.

This is due to the way the schedule app works. The talk selections update a local cookie to keep things fast and not put load on the server. When you reload the schedule page, this data is pushed to the server. If you do not have a login, these selections go into a global count bin.

If you do have a login, then we store your selections with your account. If you make changes to your schedule, and then logout without first reloading the page, then your selections are lost. Logging out deletes the cookies.

Closing the browser does not log out out. A separate cookie is used for managing that.

If you are logged in, you will see two save and revert buttons on each days table in the upper right hand corner. These either save your changes, or revert to the version stored on the server.

This is described in the schedule help (that question mark icon thingie) that is just barely more grey than white and impossible to see ;-)

Sorry for any problems people have been having. (117 people have created personal schedules at this time)
Anonymous said…
The schedule page is extremely slow and clunky in IE7. It's not what I'd expect to use to schedule talks in a conference about the world's nimblest programming language. :-)
Anonymous said…
Update: I meant to load & reload the page. Maybe this is just a fact of life with all the bytes you have to ship to the client for this length conference.
Doug Napoleone said…
@john:

This is purely a result of JAVASCRIPT using the Dojo Toolkit. The page takes less than 1 second to load. Then javascript kicks in and it halts....

The page bytes are nothing and everything is cached on the server.

The problem is two fold:

1. The version of Dojo Toolkit is very slow and bulky

2. IE7 is less than stellar when it comes to javascript performance. (You should hear some of the things the developers of Silverlight 1.0 have to say)

I tried to switch over to JQuery, but after spending a week on it, I was still not done, and I figured having something slow for windows users who insist on using IE, was better than nothing.

Maybe next year.
Anonymous said…
Doug:

Please don't judge me too harshly for using IE7 -- I'm normally a Firefox user. :-) I was using it for other reasons (I was testing some toolbars) and so I used it for the scheduling since it was already open...

Thank you for sharing that technical info. I've read many good things about JQuery. My site uses Dojo, and we use only 1/8 of its functionality. I've been meaning to make the time to see if it makes sense to replace it. This sort of prods me to move it up my stack.

Anyway, Cheers, and I'll buy you a beer in Chicago.