Archive for the 'Google' Category

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CalendarBurner: Feedburner for iCal calendars

Published on October 28, 2008 in Google, RSS and Web2.0. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

I am currently using my experience with milonga.be to build a similar site for Tango in Bulgaria. One of the major components of the site is the tango calendar. In this case I have chosen not to use a special iCal visualisation tool (more on that later in a series posts on Tango2.0), but just the standard Google Calendar IFRAME-based widget.

It’s not a bad widget, but it’s too limited. You can only display “Day/Week/Month/Agenda” style, the colors and fonts are fixed and it does funny stuff for events that continue after 12:00AM (which tango events regularly do, believe me).

I’ve already talked about the fact that iCal is a sissy format and that Gcal needs some more features. I was just thinking that it would be nice if some company would jump on that and provide the whistles and bells for iCal/vCal feeds (like those of Google Calendar), just like Feedburner did with RSS/podcast feeds (and they got bought by Google, so maybe their idea wasn’t half bad). So I introduce the following concept: CalendarBurner (since the Calburner/iCalburner domains are taken).

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MIVB en Google Transit

Published on December 6, 2007 in Brussel and Google. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

Wouldn’t this be a great idea: the Brussels public transport not mapped by MIVB‘s horribly unpractical route planner, but by Google’s Transit maps. You just need to get an export of the stops, the routes and the times, and they can be shown on Google Maps just like that. Where should we start looking for the source data? Then create agency.txt, stops.txt, routes.txt, trips.txt, stop_times.txt, calendar.txt and that’s it.

Google Transit Feed

Google transit

What Google Agenda currently misses

Published on August 22, 2007 in Google and Web2.0. 3 Comments

I am using Google Agenda as the central repository for the milonga.be Belgian tango agenda, which I edit together with half a dozen other tango enthusiasts. While the principle of a central, hosted calendar storage works wonderfully, I (have to) use a modified PHPiCalendar to display different views on the agenda (‘only Brussels’, ‘only workshops’, ’1 week in advance’, ’1 month in advance’, …). There are actually a couple of features that I’d like to see in Google Agenda, and what better place to list them but here:

Google Agenda: desired features

Metadata/Folksonomy

Currently an event in the agenda has the fields Title, Date/time (with recurrency, if any) , Location and Description. What I really miss is Tags (or categories, keywords, whatever you want to call them). Tags would allow me to attribute events to categories so that I can easily slice and dice them: only display the “milonga’s”, the events in Antwerp, the events in a specific place. Now I had to write a modified ‘filtered printable view’ for PHPiCalendar so that I can search on specific words in the event title, but that is really a hack. E.g. I now ask every editor to create the event titles as

“[TYPE]: [name of the event] @ [LOCATION]“

so that I can filter on “CONCERT:” or “@ Gent”. With the tags “concert, gent, polariteit, openair” it would be so much easier.

The iCalendar specification even mentions a ‘Categories’ field, although Google Agenda currently does not use it.

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Web tool: visualize on Google Maps

Published on July 5, 2007 in Google. 8 Comments

I have been working a bit on Google Maps visualisations for my milonga.be tango site, to show an overview of all Belgian tango sites. I did it the following way:

  • I use Google Maps‘ “My Maps” to create a collection of pointers on a map. I called this map “milonga.be tango venues”. It’s not complete yet, but I have about 25 locations in it for the moment. I can easily link to this page so anyone can see it: Belgian tango venues.
  • But let’s say I want to embed it into a page. I could do it in-line (which would add a lot of JavaScript to the HTML) or use an inline frame (IFRAME). I decided to use the frame approach and build a generic KML visualizor.

Google Maps Visualizor

So how can you use it to show any KML/GeoRSS feed on your website?

  1. Go to the forret.com Google Maps visualizor tool
  2. Copy/paste the KML feed URL. Example 1: the KML link from Google Maps:
    Google Maps KML link
    Example 2: Flickr feeds also have a Flickr GeoRSS format which is compatible (now also KML).
  3. Choose the appropriate center point. Currently you have to copy/paste it from Google Maps or another application, I still have to add some interface magic to do it in the page.
  4. Press “Show!” and copy/paste the resulting IFRAME HTML code. Voila!

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