Posted at Tue 19 July 2011 03:16PM

by Rosie Williams

Brenton has been working very hard to bring us more features at Collective Action and there has been a change in how events are added to the system. In the past, events could be added by anyone as there was no membership system in place but only I had the authority to edit them once added to the system.

Now that we have a membership system we have tied event submission to being a member. This means that if you want to add an event to the Collective Action database you need to signup for a Membership. You get your own Profile page where you can save searches and events to it and sign up for Twitter reminders from @colactreminders.

All of this is free so nothing has changed in that regard. It is just that now you can manage your own event rather than trying to do it through me. You add an event by clicking on the 'Add Event' link on your Profile page. It goes to me for approval (to stop bots/spammers) and the event is then listed on your profile page so that you always know where to find it. You can then edit it any number of times if circumstances change and you need to update it.

Membership also allows you to set your search of the site in your own timezone as every event is now specific to the timezone of a state capital and you can also set your location to only retrieve events close to your chosen location.

Bringing in all these changes has caused a few glitches now and then such as having to re-geocode every single location based event in order to add the weather widget to the event show pages. This has given Google Maps the latitude (pardon the pun) to play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey with some of our events, which I'm slowly but surely correcting over time. Adding timezones also meant I had to go through and manually change all 650+ events to individual timezones so there have been lots of repetitive mundane tasks for me in supporting these upgrades!

Please take the time to add your favourite events to the system but do yourself the favour of checking first to ensure the event has not already been added. If you want to take over an event previously added by someone else then let me know at collective_action hotmail.com or @collectiveact and when your event comes through I can delete the existing entry.