Thursday, May 10, 2007

Event Publication Made Easy

Tonight I was helping to plan an upcoming event for my shul and it occurred to me that it might be handy to publicize this event on my blog. But, rather than publicizing this one date, I had, thanks to my programmer instinct, the urge to figure out a way to publish an arbitrary feed of events on my blog. As Shira is fond of saying, I always find the most complicated way to solve a simple task.

After a bit of Googling around, I found the instructions I was after here. You start with a Google Calendar that you mark public, and end up with a chunk of HTML that you drop on your blog which renders the events the upcoming events on your calendar.

Sure, you have to jump through hoops to get this, but like any programmer oriented solution, you only have to deal with this pain up front and after that things Just Work.

Here's the end result - a dynamic view of my Public Events calendar:

Now, adding an event to my blog is as simple as adding a Google Calendar entry.

Google actually provides a whole slew of ways to link to and share your calendar and events. For example, clicking on the following button will automagically subscribe you to my Public Events calendar.

The whole story on linking and sharing calendars can be found here in Google's Event Publisher Guide.

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