Updating a Public Calendar Automatically
Randal L. Schwartz
I maintain a "public" calendar, so that my friends and associates can see where I'll be. The calendar started as part of my ~/.plan file in my home directory on my first Internet-connected host at Teleport more than a decade ago. For those of you too young to remember, the dot-plan file was revealed by executing finger on the person, specifying both the username and the host. By placing my schedule in my plan file, you could find out where I'd be.
During the passing years, the use of finger became more worrisome and eventually fell out of favor, especially since the Web was a bit more secure and a lot more familiar. To accommodate, I simply symlinked my dot-plan file into a corresponding URL on my Web server, yielding the somewhat awkward and anachronistically named URL of www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/dot-plan.txt. I still edit it by updating ~/.plan with my favorite text editor.
Inside my ~/.plan file, my upcoming schedule occupies the last half and currently looks something like:
Future plans:
07 to 19 May 2007: Buffalo (NY) working for buffalo.edu
21 May 2007: Portland (OR) speaking at Advanced PLUG about PostgreSQL
23 to 26 May 2007: Portland (OR) working for geekcruises.com
26 May to 03 Jun 2007: MacMania 6 out of Seattle for Alaska
(www.geekcruises.com)
24 Jun to 01 Jul 2007: Houston (TX) for YAPC::NA::2007
Now, up until yesterday, I was manually editing that portion of the file, trying to keep it in sync with my laptop's calendar (using Mac OS X's iCal application). As I went through the sporadic recognition of "oh my gosh, it's probably out of sync again", followed by a painful scrutiny of each of my personal calendar items to see whether they should be published, followed by cutting and pasting those items into the editor window, I thought you know, there must be a better way.
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