vgqn: (Default)
vgqn ([personal profile] vgqn) wrote2008-12-06 11:02 pm

calendar feeds

As we were driving home from a concert tonight (California Bach Society featuring Venetian composers like Monteverdi and Gabrieli, very nice indeed), I said to [livejournal.com profile] magscanner , "What I really want is an RSS calendar, a calendar event aggregator. I want to be able to click a button on the website of groups I like and have their events feed into a calendar, so I can easily look and see what my event choices are for any given day."

"Do a search," he replied. "Something like that probably already exists."

Well, sort of. Google has a calendar, but there don't seem to be very many feeds for it. And certainly not from the sort of small, local groups that I want to follow. They'll need some easy way to feed their events into the aggregator. I know there are plenty of shows I've missed because I was too tired to figure out if anything I was interested in was happening, so we just stayed home and watched a movie (or worse, faffed around on the computer). So what I mainly want is to see lists of potential events. The concert we saw tonight was presented in San Francisco last night and will be in Berkeley tomorrow, so those were potential events, but tonight is the one we chose. Of course, once I've chosen it, I'd like it to be placed on my personal events calendar/iCal with all the relevant info, without me needing to type any of it. That part should be easy.

Other things I want: a distance filter, so I could see when an out of town group is playing in town, but not have their entire tour schedule show up. Prioritization, so things I'm most interested in will be at the top of the list. Categories, self-defined (like folders, kind of) so I can sort events in a way that makes sense to me.

It's all coming, I'm sure. More and more places have RSS feeds, so surely calendar feeds can't be long behind them. I'm not a leading/bleeding edge kind of person, just a moderately early adopter, but I'm so ready for this calendar app!

[identity profile] marypcb.livejournal.com 2008-12-07 11:30 am (UTC)(link)
upcoming.org is my usual recourse - and I subscribe to RSS calendars in Outlook 2007, but that's a windows solution, doesn't have the distance thing and as you say, too many sites have static calendars not iCal feeds

[identity profile] jbru.livejournal.com 2008-12-07 11:58 am (UTC)(link)
If more people adopted the hCalendar microformat, you could likely have what you want now. Seems like a good idea for a service someone could build, though. Hmm.

[identity profile] vgqn.livejournal.com 2008-12-07 06:03 pm (UTC)(link)
Hey, go for it!

[identity profile] lakeboy-55.livejournal.com 2008-12-08 01:38 am (UTC)(link)
Not asking for much, are we? I seem to remember a time when "hypertext" was a gleam in Ted Nelson's eye. Oh how soon we become jaded... :)