Supercharging our schedules

One of the neat things about building tools that can handle enormous events like SXSW Interactive is that we can use the lessons we learn there to improve the rest of the site. We've just released a significant upgrade to our event schedule pages, inspired by work we originally did to support SXSW. Schedules can now be searched, filtered by topic, day, venue or even sessions which have slides or videos.

Here are some examples:

• Sessions from jQuery UK 2012 with slides available
• Sessions from Webstock 2012 mentioning the tango
• Sessions from Microsoft's BUILD conference about Game Development
• Sessions at OSCON 2011 on Tuesday about Node.js

(The keen eyed among you might notice that we use custom designed URLs for some of these pages. We love URLs.)

Another reason to add your event schedule to Lanyrd

If you're an event organiser, there are a bunch of advantages to adding your schedule to Lanyrd. In addition to our powerful new schedule browser, your attendees will also be able to access the schedule offline using both our native iPhone app and our new cross-platform Mobile Web alternative.

We also output event schedules as iCal feeds, so your attendees can load them in to their favourite calendar software, including Microsoft Outlook or iCal on the Mac or iPhone.

Finally, having pages for each of your sessions means your speakers (or attendees) can add their slides, notes and video to the session, helping to create a permanent record of their talk. Here's a tip for speakers: put the session's short URL on your title slide to help your audience find them after the talk.

Sharing and publicising talk materials is a great way to drum up interest in your next event.