Blog Post

Thinking about the future of our website, I’m always on the lookout for ways to bring our community closer and make information easier to find. Two underrated services CardDAV and CalDAV, could really help. I'll be looking to build these out in an appropriate way. 

Caldav is essentially a modern, shareable events calendar. You’re already using it every time you add a Google Calendar event or accept an Outlook invite. The magic happens when you subscribe your Apple, Android or Windows device to a CalDAV server: trusted organizers add the next Peppertree Market or footy fixture, and it simply appears in your calendar, no manual edits on our website and no bulk emails. You can hide and show the calendars as you see fit. 

CardDAV is like a living, digital White Pages. Subscribe once, and suddenly your phone’s address book fills with all the up-to-date contacts for Minlaton our medical centre, café, pub, even that new store down the street. If a business changes its number or email, they update it once on the CardDAV server, and every subscriber sees the change instantly. No more 'We have a new number / email / website / owner / address'. 

On a related note, I’m also playing with the idea of an invite-only recipe server, a community cookbook you can actually cook from. Imagine selecting Nana’s lemon slice recipe online, hitting “Generate Shopping List,” and getting a list of only what you need, organized aisle by aisle for our Minlaton supermarket. You can even track pantry inventory and collaborate on tweaks (“more ginger!”).

None of these tools require users to dive into code, just subscribe, log in, and enjoy a smarter, more connected site. If you’re intrigued by the open-source recipe project or want to see how CardDAV/CalDAV could work here, let me know!