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Rss Feeds Recs @lemmy.world mulcahey @lemmy.world

Create a Google Calendar from RSS?

The goal: Easily see upcoming events from various NYC venues in one place, possibly a Google Calendar.

The problem: Bars and venues all use different sites and apps to manage their event calendars, meaning I have to check EACH one individually. It sucks.

A few venues use Google Calendar, so I've already managed to import those to my own Google Calendar via IFTTT. But the rest use their own website. I've listed all of my desired venues & their calendars below.

My best guess at a solution: Find a way to convert these sites to RSS, then use IFTTT to convert the RSS feeds to Google Calendar entries.

  1. Is that the correct solution?
  2. Does anyone know the best way to do that?

Here are the calendars that I need to convert:

And one newsletter:

These venues already use Google Calendar, so I've successfully imported them into my Google Calendar.

Thank you RSS Feeds community!

1
1 comments

  • Old school solution: email them and ask if they'd be interested in making their calendars actually useful.

  • Hmm RSS feeds don't seem like the best solution for this. I could see a situation where you'd have to update a calendar feed entry (with an updated time or location or something). Your RSS feed users would never get those updates because each RSS feed item entry is cached by RSS readers. You could keep making new RSS feed entries for each calendar update, but that seems like it could get pretty messy and make the RSS feed really noisy. Especially for people who may not be interested in the specific events you're updating.

    Why not just create a calendar link and pass that around to your audience? Whenever you add any events to it, it'll automatically show up on the calendar. You can also include links to the .ics files in the email newsletters you're sending out.

  • Hmm RSS feeds don't seem like the best solution for calendar events. They frequently require updates to the details (location, times, etc). Those could be done in new RSS feed item updates, but the feed will get really noisy. Especially if you're not interested in the specific events that are being updated.

    I think creating an RSS feed for each site's newsletter or website updates is a good idea. Most likely the calendar events will be included any new newsletter or website updates anyway.