Calendaring 102
B2Blog: I know what Google’s going to do next!
I’ve seen serious traffic on my church’s website this month from Googlebots. Last year I added a Calendar to the site using the ical standard, and now the Googlebots are pinging the heck out of the php pages rendering the calendar. We’re talking 90% of the site’s accesses have been from Google this month.
Well over a year ago I floated the notion that we’d give people an iCal calendar (or Mozilla variant) and let them publish the sucker off to a web site… everyone could subscribe to whatever calendar they wanted.
There have been scripts to parse the iCal format for a while, heck could’ve written it here as the format is basically xml. We could aggregate this stuff and spread out the chore of getting data into calendars.
I still believe a centralized calendar is still the better way for a large-ish institution. Even if we limited the iCals to one per department/office/program that is still over 60 calendars that have the chance to provide bad data. At least in the centralized model people could make mistakes but finding them, natch, correcting them would be a lot easier.
I want to use iCal. I’ll start at home. For some reason I can not sync MeetingMaker < –> Palm < — > iCal. The latest Palm software has a conduit conflict catcher. Seems with the Palm sync one should be able to sync three ways by saying do them in this order and this one is the master.