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Ask the Owl

Comet Calendar Tips

Introduction

Comet Calendar is the central UT Dallas calendar for publishing and finding campus events. Comet Calendar receives almost 50,000 views per month, making it one of the top pages on the UT Dallas website. Publishing your events on Comet Calendar brings more visibility to your program or organization, promotes attendance and sends a message that your group is engaged and active.

Comet Calendar also serves as a useful planning tool. For example, if you see that a major campus event is scheduled the same day you planned to host yours and that the event may complicate parking, you may decide to reschedule. If you see that another Jindal School program with aims and an audience similar to yours already has scheduled an event on the day you planned to host yours, you may decide to coordinate efforts.

Jindal School Dean Hasan Pirkul loves to see Comet Calendar teeming with JSOM events each day.

Even if your event is not open to the public, please post it on Comet Calendar, in part because this is helpful to others in JSOM for their planning purposes. You can take advantage of publishing your event as “private” and having it added to a custom event feed on your Jindal School program page. More on this functionality in the “Event Feed” section below.

Until recently, Comet Calendar was a custom application run by UT Dallas Web Services. As of April 2020, Comet Calendar is run by Localist, a third-party event-publishing platform. Most features between the old and new systems are unchanged, but there are some key differences, which is the subject of this article.

Publishing Events

Do you have access to add events for JSOM?

To add an event to Comet Calendar, you need to have publishing rights for JSOM. One way to check if you have these rights is to visit the UT Dallas Localist Live Events Admin page. After signing in with your NetID/Password, you should see JSOM events listed there. If you don’t see any events, email webdeveloper@utdallas.edu to request access to add events for JSOM.

Add an Event

Once you have access to add events for JSOM, you can visit https://calendar.utdallas.edu/admin/events/new to add an event.

Note: There is another link (https://calendar.utdallas.edu/event/create) that you reach by visiting Comet Calendar and clicking “Submit an Event.” Do not use this link if you need your event to appear on a custom event feed on your JSOM webpage(s). The necessary “Keywords” field is not available.

UT Dallas Web Services has created guides to help with general questions about adding, canceling and getting help with Comet Calendar. These are great resources for getting acquainted with the system.

Key Recommendations

Register Now

In the Description field, we recommend writing two paragraphs. The first paragraph is a brief, 1-2 sentence description of the event. The second paragraph is a link to register with just the word “Register now.”

  1. Log in to the Comet Calendar admin area powered by Localist.
  2. Find your event or create a new event.
  3. In the Description field, write a few descriptive sentences that tell the user exactly what to expect and why they should attend your event. Reinforce whether the event is in-person or virtual.
  4. Start a new line for your registration link. You want the link to appear on its own rather than buried in a longer sentence.
  5. Use an action word and keep the phrase brief. Do not say “Click Here.” Highlight the phrase and click “B” to make the text bold. Below are a few examples:
    • Register Now
    • Register Here
    • Join the Virtual Session
  6. Highlight the text, click the link icon in the middle of the bar at the top of the Description field, paste your event URL into the URL field and click “OK.”

You can also include the registration link in the Dial-In Instructions field in the Location section. Note that this information will appear on the UT Dallas Comet Calendar listing for your event, but may not appear in your JSOM Calendar listing. Therefore, always include the registration link in the Description field, using the method described above. Better to give your visitors multiple chances to click a registration link than no chances!

Recurring Events

You can create one event and add multiple dates to make it recurring, so it appears on Comet Calendar on multiple dates and times. Each occurrence of such an event has the exact same Name and Description.

However, if any occurrence of the recurring event needs to have a different Name or Description, it is no longer a recurring event. (The old Comet Calendar allowed for a recurring event with different Names and Descriptions. The new Localist-run Comet Calendar is a stickler: Recurrences must be identical except in Date and Time.) So, if you have a recurring event but would like to have a unique registration link for each occurrence, this is not possible. Changing the registration link in the description updates all occurrences of the event.

Here is the solution to having a series of events that are similar except for a detail in the Name and/or Description (such as the registration link):

  1. Create the first occurrence of the event in Localist
    1. Name, Description, Schedule, Location and Department are critical
      1. When you enter Start Date, Start Time and End Time, you must click “Add Above to Schedule”
      2. Department needs to be “Naveen Jindal School of Management”
    2. Classification and Contact info are highly recommended
    3. Use of a keyword or keywords is how you connect your event to the feed on your Jindal School webpage, if you have set that up with JSOM Web Services. (Here is an example of a program webpage with that calendar feed. See “Event Feed,” below, for Information on how to set up a feed.)
  2. Click “Save Changes” at the bottom right
    1. Wait till you see “Event successfully saved” in the upper left
  3. Click “Copy Event” in the upper right
    1. An “Are you sure?” pop-up will appear. Click ”OK.”
  4. In the new, copied event, edit the Name and/or Description and the Date/Time
    1. Be sure to trash the Date/Time for the previous event.
  5. Continue “Save Changes” and “Copy Event” until you have a unique event for each occurrence.
  6. You may need to click on “Pending” under “Events” in the left navigation on Localist to view and approve your events.

Shortcut to Editing a Particular Event from Your Event Feed

Event feeds on Jindal School webpages link the title of the event to that event’s listing on the Jindal School Calendar. (The Jindal School Calendar is a collection of all Comet Calendar events with “Naveen Jindal School of Management” selected as the Department.)

If you need to edit one of these events, here is a shortcut for finding the exact event in the Localist Admin Dashboard, without having to search for it.

  1. Click the event title in your Event Feed to go to that event’s listing on the Jindal School Events Calendar.
  2. Copy the number that appears in the URL for that page, after “id=” in your web browser’s address bar. (Not the number after “instance=”)
  3. Open the Localist Admin Dashboard in another browser tab.
  4. On the left navigation, click “Events” and then “Live” to show all live JSOM events.
  5. Click any event in the list.
  6. Go to the URL in your web browser’s address bar and replace the number at the end with the number you copied in Step 2, and press “Enter” or “Return.”
  7. You can now edit the event.

Event Feed

You can identify your Comet Calendar events with a particular keyword or keywords specific to your organization. JSOM Web Services can then create an event feed that looks for all events with the keyword(s) and automatically publishes your next five upcoming events on your JSOM webpage(s). Contact jsomweb@utdallas.edu or create an Atlas ticket to add or update an event feed from Comet Calendar.

Existing JSOM Keywords

Below are keywords that already exist in Comet Calendar. Only use the keyword(s) that are part of an organization that you own.

In the Keyword field for your Localist event, start typing the keyword, select the autofill you want, and press “enter” to commit that keyword to the field.

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