pcResFeed
Put an RSS feed in Envisionware's PC Reservation client
Overview
This simple script takes an RSS feed (generated, let's say, by your library's Evanced SignUp calendar) and cleans it up a bit for display on the PC Reservation client screen. There is a left sidebar that will display the contents of an RSS file saved in the appropriate directory. Since there are visual limitations on what that sidebar displays, the script trims down descriptions to dates, times, and locations.
Requirements
Nokogiri: gem install nokogiri (as of this writing, doesn't work with ruby 2.2.1; you may need to use 2.1 or earlier)
On Windows:
As long as you have the appropriate sharing and permission set up on PC Res servers, you should be good.
On Linux:
Since you are sending to Windows machines, you'll need to mount the SMB destinations. I used sudo apt-get install cifs-utils and then edited my /etc/fstab to mount the destination directories as local ones. Beware that permissions can be an issue. YMMV.
How to use
Open locations-template.yml. Replace the info there with yours, and copy-paste more entries as necessary. For example, if you're in a library branch system and are running an instance of PC Res for each branch, you'll need to account for each location here (and provide location-specific RSS if available). Save this file as locations.yml.
Now all you have to do is run the script, pcresfeed.rb. You may want to make it a cronjob. This way the PC Res feed can update every morning and promote upcoming events to your patrons.
The default number of events is five, because I've found this works well. However, if you want to change it, change the eventmax variable on line 8.
To-do
Error handling