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Web Calendars Should Be Discoverable and Provide iCalendar Feeds

ericlathrop.com

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Re: Web Calendars Should Be Discoverable and Provide iCalendar Feeds

#11

Post by megaman821 »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #7

Who would want to have their calendar cluttered by random events from the internet? I have a website where, among other things, people can see a list of a very specific type of events that they might be interested in. Each event has a button where people can add it to their calendars. I thought about providing an iCal link, but refrained because I thought it would be frustrating for users to have me put random events…

Calendar subscriptions get put into a different name category. You can hide them or give them a low contrast color. I use it for sporting events and trash collection. I would love it if more companies and services exposed their events as a calendar feed.

Re: Web Calendars Should Be Discoverable and Provide iCalendar Feeds

#13

Post by jayknight »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #7

Who would want to have their calendar cluttered by random events from the internet? I have a website where, among other things, people can see a list of a very specific type of events that they might be interested in. Each event has a button where people can add it to their calendars. I thought about providing an iCal link, but refrained because I thought it would be frustrating for users to have me put random events…

It wouldn't be random, but user selected. I have imported calendars for church, daughter's soccer team, some clubs and hobby events, etc.

Some of them I leave disabled unless/until I want to check them specifically, but it's nice to have them right in my calendar instead of having to go to the right page or app to see different schedules.

Re: Web Calendars Should Be Discoverable and Provide iCalendar Feeds

#14

Post by sixstringtheory »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #7

Who would want to have their calendar cluttered by random events from the internet? I have a website where, among other things, people can see a list of a very specific type of events that they might be interested in. Each event has a button where people can add it to their calendars. I thought about providing an iCal link, but refrained because I thought it would be frustrating for users to have me put random events…

In addition to what sibling comments have said, and I know this is a waning concern these days, but having the events in iCal also affords offline use.

Re: Web Calendars Should Be Discoverable and Provide iCalendar Feeds

#16

Post by toyg »

captn3m0 wrote: post #6
aantix wrote: post #2

Seems like a nice weekend project. Have the user auth with their google business/teams/Apple account - sync the calendar, make the calendar available via rss.

> make the calendar available via rss. I've thought a lot about ICS/RSS combinations[0], and my current stance is that while they achieve similar things in some cases, RSS is meant for things that happened in the past (items in the future may or may not show in your client), and calendars are meant for future events. This incompatibility makes it hard to do RSS feeds for events, unless you use event-publication-date,…

RSS is just XML, so in theory you can extend it as much as you want, including all the necessary extra bits of info for future events.

The problem, of course, is that most RSS-consuming tools don't recognise custom namespaces. Still, if you're targeting people who will write their own feed-parsing tools, it can probably work fine.

Re: Web Calendars Should Be Discoverable and Provide iCalendar Feeds

#19

Post by account-5 »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #14
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #7

Who would want to have their calendar cluttered by random events from the internet? I have a website where, among other things, people can see a list of a very specific type of events that they might be interested in. Each event has a button where people can add it to their calendars. I thought about providing an iCal link, but refrained because I thought it would be frustrating for users to have me put random events…

In addition to what sibling comments have said, and I know this is a waning concern these days, but having the events in iCal also affords offline use.

I certainly wish it wasn't a waning concern.

Re: Web Calendars Should Be Discoverable and Provide iCalendar Feeds

#20

Post by fontanka16 »

I remember reading that Aaron Schwartz was about to pursue solving internet calendars, but that he never got to it.

Imagine we would have had something like RSS for events with Feedly-like services to help us filter out the relevant parts in 2008… I would have travelled the world for concerts

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