Fun with Calendars, Subscriptions, and Maps
We added new support for Yahoo! Calendar and the newly-released Google Calendar, all-new subscription and maps options for searches, venues, and tags, and support for floating times for you iCal fans. More details after the jump...Yahoo! Calendar, Google Calendar, and iCal Downloads
You may have noticed the new "Export" option on every event, with new options for adding an event reminder to Yahoo! Calendar or the new Google Calendar. We've also added a separate download option for our iCal feeds across the site, which makes it a bit more convenient to use in applications like Mozilla Sunbird. You can also take any of our iCal feeds and subscribe to them with GCal by following these instructions.
RSS/iCal/Maps for Searches, Venues, and Tags
We've added new "Subscribe" options to all search results, restricted to all metros or just your own metros. For example, on these search results for "Ladytron," you can view a map of all Ladytron shows in the U.S. by clicking the Subscribe button and choosing the Maps option. You could then use the RSS, iCal, or My Yahoo! links to be notified about new Ladytron results as they appear, worldwide or only in your area.
We've added the same options to tags and venues, so you can keep up to date on your favorite venues or tags in your favorite RSS reader or calendaring app.
iCalendar Support and Floating Times
Warning: This part gets very geeky. We had to do some serious thinking about how the events you add to Upcoming should be represented in iCalendar, as it's a pretty tricky (read: crappy) format. We tend to stay really close to the spec as written, but as clients often act differently with the same iCalendar feeds, be on the lookout for strange behavior! Let us know what client you're using and whether it's working well for you on the iCalendar Recon Reports page on our Help wiki.
We're expecting to have some timezone support added in to Upcoming.org soon, but until then, we added in floating time parameters to our events in the feeds. This should display all events in the feed in your local timezone, but let us know if it doesn't. We also decided to convert all multi-day events with a start time into recurring events over the span of time from the start date to the end date. For example, a three-day class from 4pm to 6pm will no longer be represented as three all-day events, but three repeating events each two hours long. Again, this seemed to look better in the clients we tested, but we need your advice here. Thanks!
How to Use the New Features
We should mention that we left the old iCal feeds intact, because we didn't want to break anything and let you use it if you prefer. So to use the new feeds, you should resubscribe using the new iCal links site-wide. Just click the "Subscribe" button on the calendars you subscribe to, and click the "Add to iCal" link again.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Posted by 
getluky at April 14, 2006
getluky at April 14, 2006
For now, if you want to do a one-off import of entire calendars, use the Settings > Import Calendar to import a downloaded .ics file from our Metro pages. That does seem to work, but it won't receive updates from our calendar ever.
Again, this doesn't appear to be an issue with our iCal files, it looks to be a GCal problem.
For example "Umlaute" are not recognized and the street is not found by Yahoo! Maps. Is that something on behalf of Yahoo! Maps?
Go to the metro you like, click the "Subscribe" button, right-click the "Add to iCal" link, and "Copy" it to the clipboard. Then follow these directions to subscribe to the calendar.