Eventcal - a Second Life Events Calendar to iCal bridge

What is it?

This is a service to provide an iCal feed for a particular category of the Second Life Events Calendar. You can subscribe to this via Google Calendar, iCal on OS X, or (I think) Outlook on the PC - in fact, any program which supports this standard.

How to Use

If your software is capable of subscribing to a remote feed, it will ask you for the URL of it. Put in the following:

http://ordinalmalaprop.com/tools/eventcal/?cat=X

where X is the number for the category of event you wish to subscribe to:

18 => "Discussion"
19 => "Sports"
20 => "Live Music"
22 => "Commercial"
23 => "Nightlife/Entertainment"
24 => "Games/Contests"
25 => "Pageants"
26 => "Education"
27 => "Arts and Culture"
28 => "Charity/Support Groups"
29 => "Miscellaneous"

For example, the feed for Discussion events is

http://ordinalmalaprop.com/tools/eventcal/?cat=18

Each calendar is re-scanned every hour, and looks up to a week ahead.

Adding to Google Calendar

Go to your calendar page, and click "Manage calendars", which is on the left hand side under your list of calendars.

the manage calendars box

Then under "Other Calendars", click the "Add calendar" button. Select the "Public Calendar Address" tab at the top of the resulting box, and enter the above URL for your chosen feed.

illustration of what the 'public calendar address' box in gCal looks like

Google Calendar should update itself fairly shortly with all of the appropriate events (it may take a little while if it is a busy list and you are the first to look at it for an hour).

Adding to iCal

From the Calendar menu, select "Subscribe...".

subscribing from iCal menu

Enter the URL of the feed into the resulting box.

entering the feed URL

Now select options. It is not worth updating the calendar more frequently than once per hour, as it is only updated at most once per hour. Other options are up to you. Then, click "OK", and iCal should do the rest.

entering the calendar options

Feedback

Please leave comments either on this Journal entry of mine, this Forum thread, or send them directly to me via Twitter or other avenues.

Notes

Eventcal is written in PHP, and generates the iCal data itself (it is not terribly complex to do this). While testing it I found the iCalendar Validator very useful, although it does seem to be rather picky at times about newlines when reading from a source URL - best to cut and paste the exact code into the box.