Massless

Splicing fun and Google Calendar

The experiment I'll be mentioning in this post is called Break In Case Of Boredom. (music-ish happenings)

I like playing with discovery mechanisms. Yesterday I had a nice time watching new calendars emerge in Google Calendar and I'd like to pass along some fun to others who are just getting started and may find this useful.

To search for new public calendars, do the following:

Click on Settings
Click on Calendars
Click on the Add Calendar button
Enter some keywords and click Search

I quickly spotted Brett's Flavorpill Select calendar and added it. Then I added another SF events calendar and alongside my own music calendar this seemed pretty useful.

So now I had a (mostly) musical events calendar. I'm happy with that but I also wanted to share that on my own site. So, I subscribed to the calendars in Google Reader and shared them which meant I could just copy any of the Calendar clips to any page on my site. Ok, I'm satisfied.

Except... I wasn't just yet done with customization so I made a spliced feed of all three calendars.

Fun. Of course, I'm a bit of a Javascript hacker and decided to mess around further by getting the feeds as Javascript (Reader can do this with any feed) and styled the clips differently using CSS which resulted in a personal upcoming events page; a Break In Case Of Boredom portal. A quick cobble - only tested it in Firefox and Safari. Now I can easily point friends to this - I mean if I thought it'd be their cup o' tea.

(I really should remove my own bands from the list even though it's nice for me to see which events conflict with our shows. Besides, I can create another calendar easily enough.)

Ok, definitely done for today. Of course, there are likely to be even better splicing opportunities very soon. As excellent sites like upcoming.org have made clear, there are plenty of people that are better at relevant event suggestions than I will ever be so I'm just going to keep refreshing the search I mentioned earlier as new (and better) editors get their cal on.

posted at April 13, 2006, 3:34 AM