New iCal Subscription URL

September 10, 2009 1:47 PM

Hey meetup fans, we have a new iCalendar Meetups Subscription location.

For the past couple of days we've had trouble with the service hosting our iCal subscription file so we switched to a locally-hosted version. We're going to keep the old iCal URL active for as long as we can, but it's been flaky so we recommend updating your iCal subscription to this URL: webcal://metatalk.metafilter.com/meetup-ics.mefi.

posted by pb to feature requests at 1:47 PM (13 comments total)

Yay!
posted by jessamyn at 1:48 PM on September 10

For those people using iCal, to change it, just go into iCal, right-click on the "MetaFilter Meets" calendar in the left-side pane, choose "Change URL", and paste in the new one instead of the old Technorati one.

(There is also a menu option in the Calendar menu.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:05 PM on September 10

Is iCalendar a Mac thing? If so, what can I do with this on a PC? Firefox wants to send this to 30boxes.com. Is that a good idea?

Apologies for the cluelessness, and yes, I am prepared for the endless riffs on this comment.
posted by Afroblanco at 2:06 PM on September 10

iCalendar is an open format that many calendar applications use. Wikipedia has a List of applications with iCalendar support. Yeah, you could subscribe with 30boxes or Google Calendar. You've probably used 30boxes in the past so the webcal:// pseudo-protocol is mapped to that app in your browser.
posted by pb at 2:12 PM on September 10 [1 favorite]

Cool, thanks pb.
posted by doctor_negative at 2:27 PM on September 10

awesome. thanks pb
posted by ShawnString at 3:12 PM on September 10

Nifty! Now I have a calendar with entries besides "take garbage out" reminders.

That reminds me. I need to take the garbage out.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 3:14 PM on September 10 [1 favorite]

I wish there was a way to subscribe to just my town's calendar, but I can see that LOCATION has stuff like "South Philly" in it, which would make that hard. I wonder if there's an easy fix for that.
posted by popechunk at 4:51 PM on September 10

OH AWESOME
posted by iamkimiam at 5:34 PM on September 10

Awesome! Thanks, pb!
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 8:43 PM on September 10

Apparently Firefox does not yet support adding random web applications to the webcal scheme. (It may be possible if someone knows the correct syntax to manually add using about:config, but I ran out of gas on that search.)

I was able to add this to Google Calendar by copying the link and using the Add by URL feature under "Other calendars". (If you are then disconcerted by its presence, you can hide it by clicking on the name.)
posted by dhartung at 10:51 PM on September 10

dhartung: Normally you add helper applications in Edit/Preferences/Applications (or Tools/Options/Applications). But that doesn't seem to work for web-based applications.

So I dug around and found this - which is more from the developer side, so they can provide a link for their users to create the link in FF.

As a result I've just been searching through about:config, and I think where the handler gets registered is gecko.handlerService.schemes

So what you want to add (I think) is:

gecko.handlerService.schemes.webcal.[some number].name = "Example Calendar"
gecko.handlerService.schemes.webcal.[that number].uriTemplate = http://calendar.example.com/addcalendar=%s

The %s gets replaced by the URL you clicked on. The template will depend on the target application's URI schema.
posted by Electric Dragon at 6:13 AM on September 11 [1 favorite]

NOTE: Events show up as all day - which is fine as you should likely clickly the linky before wandering around the real world in search of mefi's.

popechunk: I just loaded up the ical & then just searched for my city name - its not automatic but then I can copy it easily to my work cal and go from there.

Also: Thanks - it is handy. I may even go to one of these meetup things.
posted by zenon at 9:33 AM on September 11