Google Calendar
So I’ve been using this for a few days now — and I’m loving it. A calendaring system that deals coherently with the web:
- good RSS integration
- publishing calendars, easily, via HTTP
- subscribing to third-party calendars via HTTP
- a URL API, allowing third-party sites and user scripts to add events to your calendar
I keep finding little things that make perfect sense, and just feel more logical than what I’ve used elsewhere. This rocks!
One thing still needs work, though: the links to Mapping fail spectacularly, for non-US addresses at least. But that’s pretty minor.
By the way, I have a feeling that Mac.com had parts of this, but really, you had to drink a lot of Apple kool-aid to use that, and I just didn’t go for that. Sorry Jobs fans.
Do you know what would be cool now? If Upcoming.org published venue/location-specific iCal feeds. Oh look, they do! Awesome…
Tags: calendar, gcal, google, hcalendar, http, ical, rss, upcoming, web
James Corbett said,
April 15, 2006 @ 4:10 pm
Yes, Google Calendar is really terrific. I’ve made an oath not to talk about an IT event in Ireland which I’m going to attend without first making it available as a Google Caledar event for one click addition from my blog to your own Calendar.
But….. tha Greasemonkey script isn’t installing for me – I’m getting an exception error and I am using the lastest version of Greasemonkey. Did it work for you Justin?
Justin said,
April 15, 2006 @ 4:22 pm
odd; I’m using GM 0.6.4 too and it’s working fine as far as I could see. If I go to a page with a hCalendar microformat — such as http://upcoming.org/event/70508/ — the button appears, and I can click on it to get a working appointment addition page.
btw there’s an alternative script at http://randomchaos.com/software/firefox/greasemonkey/googlehcalendar/ – maybe that works better? (it uses a better image for the user-script-added button, too ;)
James Corbett said,
April 15, 2006 @ 9:41 pm
Thanks Justin but no, that one didn’t work either – same error message when trying to install that script. I also uninstalled and reinstalled a fresh new Greasemonkey and still no good. I’m using Firefox 1.5.0.1. Damn, this is frustrating :(
James Corbett said,
April 15, 2006 @ 11:07 pm
Eureka! A bit of about:config hackery has saved the day. This script is f**king cool B-)
Brian Ewins said,
April 16, 2006 @ 11:09 pm
Justin – the location searches work best if you format them like so:
a search string that will work (a label)
eg:
York, UK (Bloody eck its yooorkshire) 55.991229 -5.142117 (The really steep hill I couldn’t cycle)
I find the lat/long/label variation, like the second one, is a reasonable compromise; its human-readable and precise. I’d prefer if google supported ‘geo’ in ical, and provided a box for it in their UI; then we could type the lat/long separately, and location would be just a label. But then I also want google to support labelling of locations in google local, so that I can re-use locations in calendar.
ct said,
April 21, 2006 @ 1:55 pm
Hey Justin. So I get a little bit of time to cobble a Ruby script together to munge the RSS feeds into iCal format and look what happens… Google open up a Calendar API
If you wait long enough…
Justin said,
April 21, 2006 @ 2:01 pm
sorry to hear it Ciaran! is the script usable anyway? ;)