BIDA Calendar iCal Feed

post by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2025-02-06T01:30:07.887Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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A while ago I played around with manually generating iCal feeds for events, encoding the BIDA's regular schedule (1st and 3rd Sundays back then, with a more complex pattern for family dances and open bands) as in a machine-readable format. This was a fun project, but it didn't work very well: it didn't have any way to handle cancellations, special events, or other one-off adjustments to the schedule.

Still, having events automatically show up on calendars is great, and after Jeff Keller asked I decided to put something together.

Here's the feed: bidadance.org/events.ics. You can add it in Google Calendar by going to "Other Calendars" > "+" > "From URL":

And then pasting in the calendar URL:

Here's the next afternoon contra I'm able to attend, showing up on my phone:

For the actual implementation a script reads in the machine-readable list of scheduled events (dances.js). This is a bit more awkward that it could be, since the list is essentially JSONP and not pure JSON, so it needs to do a little hacky parsing. Then it interprets the records and uses the icalendar package to build in iCal file. Dates, times, and libraries can all be a bit tricky when they're an area you don't work in much, and I found Claude to be pretty helpful here.

I also set up a cron job (script) that looks for changes each hour and if so checks them in.

Let me know if you see any problems with it!

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