I had a pleasant surprise this week when someone pointed out that our course offering events were appearing in Google search results. For example, if you search for practical journalism course<https://www.google.co.uk/#q=practical+journalism+course> you should find:
1.
Pages - Course Details : HND Practical Journalism<http://www.fife.ac.uk/student/courses/course/HDPRJ>
www.fife.ac.uk/student/courses/course/HDPRJ
<https://www.google.co.uk/#>
* <http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0ST8Bb3dn6IJ:www.fife.ac.uk/student/courses/course/HDPRJ+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk>
* <https://www.google.co.uk/search?biw=1440&bih=731&q=related:www.fife.ac.uk/student/courses/course/HDPRJ+practical+journalism+course&tbo=1&sa=X&ei=K-doVeOfOsG2UpOXgfAG&ved=0CDUQHzAA>
Accredited by the National Council for Training of Journalists, the HND Practical Journalism is designed to equip you with the essential skills required to develop ...
31 Aug 2015 - 10 Jul 2016
Full Time<http://www.fife.ac.uk/student/courses/course/HDPRJ>
Kirkcaldy - St Brycedale
What's new is the last row, which picks up the offering that runs between start and end dates, has a mode of attendance and a location.
Many years ago, we incorporated a hCalendar microformat<http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar> in our course details page generator (we use XSLT to render the content sections of the page from our XCRI<http://www.xcri.co.uk> feed, so we have total control of the markup). Google's rich snippet page for events<https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/events> does not actually tell you how to craft the markup. Ours is dismally archaic, but it seems to work; here is the stripped-down markup for the table row:
<tr class="vevent">
<td class="summary">Full Time</td>
<td>
<abbr title="20150831" class="dtstart">31 Aug 2015</abbr>
</td>
<td>
<abbr title="20160710" class="dtend">10 Jul 2016</abbr>
</td>
<td class="location">Kirkcaldy - St Brycedale</td>
</tr>
If you are using HTML5, I guess you would want to use microdata/schema.org instead.
Tavis Reddick
Enterprise Systems Support Technologist
ICT Services
Fife College
Stenton Campus, Glenrothes
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