[conspire] July schedule posted

[Tony Godshall]

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 9:43 AM, Rick Moen<rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> Quoting Don Marti (dmarti at zgp.org):
>
>> begin Rick Moen quotation of Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 07:32:43PM -0700:
>>
>> > CABAL's calendar, on http://linuxmafia.com/cabal/ is a flat HTML file
>> > that I periodically update using vi -- which suits me, because it's
>> > simple, lightweight, and has very little software to break.  Tony is
>> > asking how he can "subscribe to it", i.e., to the calendar portion of
>> > http://linuxmafia.com/cabal/ via iCAL, impliedly using RSS, I would
>> > guess.
>>
>> There's "hCalendar" --
>> http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar
>> http://www.peachpit.com/guides/content.aspx?g=webdesign&seqNum=356
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCalendar
>>
>> HTML markup to indicate that something is an event.
>> All regular HTML, no extra software on the server
>> side required.
>
> It's an interesting spec.  In order for it to work, I would have to
> greatly elaborate the existing simple HTML to wrap all event data in CSS
> markup.  An existing entry is like this:
>
> <tr>
> <td><strong>Sat. Jul. 25</strong>
> <td><strong>1-9pm</strong>
> <td><strong>Menlo Pk</strong>
> <td><strong><a href="#cabal">CABAL</a> meeting/installfest </strong> at
>  <a href="#directions">Rick & Deirdre's House</a> <a
> href="http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/map-1105Altschul.gif"><em>(map)</em></a>
> </tr>
>
> A transformed entry would perhaps be something like this (markup
> untested and thus possibly not valid or useful):
>
> <tr><div class="vevent">
> <td><strong><span class="eventdate">Sat. Jul. 25</span></strong>
> <td><strong><span class="eventtime">
>     <abbr class="dtstart" title="2009-07-25T13:00-0700">1</abbr>-
>     <abbr class="dtend" title="2009-07-25T21:00-0700">9pm</abbr></strong>
>     </span>
> <td><strong><span class="location">Menlo Pk</span></strong>
> <td><strong><span class="summary"><a href="#cabal">CABAL</a>
>     meeting/installfest </strong> at <a href="#directions">Rick
>     & Deirdre's House</a>
>     <a href="http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/map-1105Altschul.gif"><em>(map)</em></a>
>     </span>
>     </div>
> </tr>
>
> That is of course in hCalendar, which is not what anybody actually asks
> for (you'd end up saying "just use the Operator extension for Firefox",
> etc.), so:
>
>> There are tools to extract hCal to an original ICalendar/ics file.
>
> I see one such mentioned on the hcalendar-authoring page:  "download and
> install the X2V XSLT yourself and run it on your own server".  That's at
> http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/ -- so, apparently, instead of plain
> HTML, I'd end up having to recode the page in PHP that invokes the X2V
> XSLT XML transform on the page.
>
> All of that effort gains me the ability to spoon-feed event information
> to people who apparently cannot be bothered to just look at a Web page.
> It's not clear to me that the fairly considerable conversion time _and_
> the fairly considerable additional ongoing maintenance overhead are in
> any way justified (not to mention debugging time and hassle every time
> somebody complains "your .ics is broken because I can't read it in my
> [foo] software on my [bar] operating system".
>
> Technophilia is all and well, but there's a limit to it when other
> people volunteer signficant amounts of my ongoing time and effort,
> and I don't even see a compelling advantage.

A simple "no" would have sufficed.

I keep missing things because I don't go to each website.
.ics files let me collect them into a single calendar.  Perhaps
I am interested in too many calendars or events.  Whatever-
go ahead and judge me.

When I have a little time I'll wget your html and run it through
a little magic python or perl and give you the code.  But I
didn't know until your response whether or not the work
had already been done.  Would have hated to duplicate the
effort.

I'm sorry if it came across as a lazy person's demand on your
time.  I will admit my replies can be a little terse.

Anyhow, I think .ical calendars are just plaintext vcalendar
entries like Thunderbird/Lightning/Sunbird/Evolution do...

(quick wikipedia lookup, sho'nuf, paste starts)

Here is a simple example[7] of an iCalendar object, "Bastille Day
Party" event which occurs July 14, 1997 17:00 (UTC) through July 15,
1997 03:59:59 (UTC):
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//hacksw/handcal//NONSGML v1.0//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:19970714T170000Z
DTEND:19970715T035959Z
SUMMARY:Bastille Day Party
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

(paste from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/iCalendar ends)
(it's from wikipedia- it must be true ;-) )

Just as easy to edit in vi as html is.

Tony