NerdAlert: I've made a widget to update GCal with EDF What's On events. 'Ave a look.

[5imon]

During a particularly idle moment I mused on how great the world would be if all the What's On events were automagically added to a calendar. This would solve the particular problem that of what to do of an evening at short notice.

Why trawl through the historical EDF What's On postings looking for the evening in question when you could have a calendar view listing everything that's been posted against the day that it's on?

I decided to take this problem on, and I decided to use THE INTERNET to make it happen.

Here's the issue: some people - despite admin's request to the contrary - don't post the date and time of their event in the title of the post. So this boiled down to two parts:

1) recognise where the date IS in the title of the post, add this event to a google calendar

2) recognise where the date is not part of the title, scan the body of the post for a date and if found append it to the title, and send this to a google calendar

All other posts - ie where there is no date either in the title or body are submitted as is. This may or may not be processed correctly by Google Cal but this is the risk you run if you disobey admin's rules. So nyuh.

So steps were:

1) Created a Yahoo Pipe which loads the EDF What's On RSS feed. Filters out anything starting in Re: since the RSS feed includes thread replies. Used RegEx to include only those items that have a date in them.

Pipe source is here: http://bit.ly/H7Chau

2) Created another pipe to find those without a date in the title. Scanned the body for a date using the same regex. If found, stores the text and appends to title

Pipe source is http://bit.ly/H8OF3P

3) a third pipe joins the RSS feeds from pipes 1) and 2) above, plus all other posts not in 1) and 2), excluding responses

4) Next step was to use the excellent IFTTT.com to process the RSS feed resulting from step 3 above and post new items to GCal when a new item arrives. GCal has some parsing logic baked in to handle stuff like "every tuesday", "next thursday", "every day this month" etc, which is why completely dateless items are submitted as is.

E Voila. Here's the result:

http://bit.ly/GQEdzO

Since GCal is syndicated, could also use IFTTT.com to send items to a twitter feed which I think @TweetsDulwich is doing, but straight from the What's on page rather than via GCal.

...but that would be a bit too nerdy...

[El Pibe]

blimey. that's marvellous, I've never seen yahoo pipes before.

I'd only add that adding a 'unique' widgetty thing based upon title & description might be good as I can see quite a few repeated entries there.

Other than that very minor quibble, hat's off to you 5imon!!

[Huguenot]

Brilliant!

A spectacularly useful nerdfest! Excellent!

[5imon]

yes there are a few things to improve..work in progress etc

duplicate entries: sometimes there'll be multiple postings for the same event eg reminders as the event draws near. I had a stab at filtering them out, but the search and match critera were pretty difficult to nail down.

the dateless calendar is sometimes a bit heavy handed in it's appending text too...need to tighten that up a bit

..but yes, Yahoo Pipes is awesome - one of the true hidden web wonders. Effectively turns the internet into a database which totally floats my nerdboat. I'll be very upset if Yahoo stop development of it, cos it looks like they are on the decline.

[the-e-dealer]

So how do I access it?

[5imon]

linky at bottom of original post

[Annette Curtain]

That is sooooo brilliantly nerdy

I love it

But can it predict Hona's return ?

NETTE:-S