A while ago I played around with manually generating iCal feeds for
events, encoding the BIDA’s regular schedule (1st and 3rd Sundays back
then, with a more complex pattern for family dances and open bands) as
in a machine-readable format. This was a fun project, but it didn’t
work very well: it didn’t have any way to handle cancellations,
special events, or other one-off adjustments to the schedule.
Still, having events automatically show up on calendars is great, and
after Jeff Keller asked
I decided to put something together.
Here’s the feed: bidadance.org/events.ics.
You can add it in Google Calendar by going to “Other Calendars” >
“+” > “From URL”:
And then pasting in the calendar URL:
Here’s the next afternoon contra I’m able to attend,
showing up on my phone:
For the actual implementation a script
reads in the machine-readable list of scheduled events (dances.js).
This is a bit more awkward that it could be, since the list is
essentially JSONP
and not pure JSON, so it needs to do a little hacky parsing. Then it
interprets the records and uses the icalendar package to
build in iCal file. Dates, times, and libraries can all be a bit
tricky when they’re an area you don’t work in much, and I found Claude to be pretty helpful
here.
I also set up a cron job (script)
that looks for changes each hour and if so checks them in.
BIDA Calendar iCal Feed
Link post
A while ago I played around with manually generating iCal feeds for events, encoding the BIDA’s regular schedule (1st and 3rd Sundays back then, with a more complex pattern for family dances and open bands) as in a machine-readable format. This was a fun project, but it didn’t work very well: it didn’t have any way to handle cancellations, special events, or other one-off adjustments to the schedule.
Still, having events automatically show up on calendars is great, and after Jeff Keller asked I decided to put something together.
Here’s the feed: bidadance.org/events.ics. You can add it in Google Calendar by going to “Other Calendars” > “+” > “From URL”:
And then pasting in the calendar URL:
Here’s the next afternoon contra I’m able to attend, showing up on my phone:
For the actual implementation a script reads in the machine-readable list of scheduled events (dances.js). This is a bit more awkward that it could be, since the list is essentially JSONP and not pure JSON, so it needs to do a little hacky parsing. Then it interprets the records and uses the icalendar package to build in iCal file. Dates, times, and libraries can all be a bit tricky when they’re an area you don’t work in much, and I found Claude to be pretty helpful here.
I also set up a cron job (script) that looks for changes each hour and if so checks them in.
Let me know if you see any problems with it!