LkldNow is introducing a new events calendar, one we think is the most comprehensive listing of things to do in Lakeland and Central Florida.

It’s at www.lkldnow.com/calendar/#!/ and if offers lots of ways you can customize it to view the events you want to see. More on that later.

While we think we’ve got the area’s most comprehensive calendar, we know it doesn’t list everything. If you’re with an organization whose event is not listed, it’s easy to add your information through this link: portal.cityspark.com/add/event/LKLDNow.

Basic listings are free, but there are paid options to promote your event through special placement. If it’s your first time, you’ll need to register.

We produce the calendar in partnership with a Utah company called CitySpark that aggregates events from a large number of online calendars. Their database includes tons of events from Central Florida because other partners include News Channel 8, the Tampa Bay Times and the Orlando Sentinel.

And that brings me to the first way you can customize the calendar to your taste: You are able to control the geographic area of events through a radius button on the right side of the control bar above the listings. It looks like this:

You can see from the screen shot of the control bar that the default radius is set to 15 miles from Lakeland. That pulls in events from Lakeland, Bartow, Winter Haven and Plant City.

  • If you want to see only Lakeland events, click on the “15 mi” and change it to 10.
  • If you want to search for events from the Tampa Bay area to metro Orlando, change it to 50.

A few more options you can personalize through the control bar:

  • Search for events or look for events in a specific category (music, sports & outdoors, food & drink, for example) by clicking on “Categories & Search.”
  • Change to a map view or a tile view using the icons in the middle of the control bar.
  • Mark your favorite events for easy reference using the icon that looks like a silhouette of a person. You’ll need to register if you want to use that option.

Users can view only virtual events by clicking a link in the yellow box at the top of the calendar. That box also has a link that lets you notify us of events that should be updated or removed.

One work in progress involves our popular music calendar, which has been available through a Google calendar in the past. Most of the music listings are still in the Google calendar but are being integrated into our new CitySpark calendar as well.

If you have any feedback or questions about the calendar, please let us know. We are still tweaking it and want to make sure it’s useful for our readers.