AlexHopmann.com

I’m interested in exploring creating RSS feeds with calendar data. In essence
taking RSS (or Atom) + iCal (or preferabbly an XML expression of iCal data) and
creating feeds with it. Imagine an easy standards-based way to subscribe to a
feed of US holidays or the local school schedule or a sports team’s schedule.

I suspect that someone has already done something in this space so I’m doing a
bit of research. My first attempt to look for info via Google surprised me a bit by how
sparse the results were. In any case I’m going to try to catalog other
references and I’d like to encourage people to contact me at
alex@hopmann.org if you are interested in
this topic and want to collaborate.

• There is a mention on
  the Google GData page of the
  scenario.
• PHP Magazine has a demo
  that fetches data from the Google calendar. They used code from an RSS
  reader but RSS itself isn’t part of this scenario at all.
• Trumba appears to
  have done this. Their format looks perfect and for now I’m going to use
  it as a starting point. Unfortunately they closed my old demo account and I
  don’t see any calendar examples in their docs where I can look at a real
  feed. I should add that I just re-signed up for a free account and they have
  an interesting usability issue. They require you to fill out all kinds of
  questions about your industry and size of organization. You can’t skip these
  questions which is going to tempt a lot of people to just respond with
  something random which will likely make the market research they wanted to
  get out of it very suspect.

I’ve taken the liberty of publishing a Trumba calendar here-

http://www.trumba.com/calendars/alexs_calendar1.rss?xcal=1  . It
doesn’t by default include the xcal data, you need to add that parameter to make
it work.

The xCal specification also appears to be an important part of making this all
work. I found
a link to a
fairly recent xCal specification written by Doug Royer who I worked with
some back a long time ago when I was involved with some of the iCal working
group activities. There are some
more links on this site over here.

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