Brussels Tango on Google Calendar
21 Aug 2006I’ve started a public Google calendar for tango events (milonga’s, salons) in and around Brussels. My preferred site, milonga.be has gone down, the agenda at tango.be is quite ugly (it uses frames *shiver* ), and Marisa & Oliver’s agenda cannot be exported. So I made my own:
One of the things I wanted to test out is how easy it was to visualize the calendar on other sites. Google Calendar publishes in iCal or XML format, so I looked for a package out there that could visualize this. After fooling around with phpiCalendar for a while (doesn’t work that well with Google Calendar, nor with remote iCal URLs), I discovered that Google already has provided a wizard for just that. Embedding this piece of code into your HTML will give you an up-to-date calendar of Tango activities in Brussels:
The data is also available as an XML feed (a variant of Atom, actually) but not in a very useful way. The data inside the feed (the item blocks) does not contain essential fields like start time and event location in separate fields. They are included in the HTML-formatted summary and content fields, so you would have to parse those to extract those details.
John Udell has published a script that fills in where and when tags in an Atom field (based on the http://schemas.google.com/g/2005 namespace), but Google does apparently not use those for publishing their XML feeds. Weird …
