Stalking done right

Although I had turned off the Where’s Seth? for the winter break, I neglected to turn it back on again for the first couple weeks of classes. The reason was that I was using a rather… kludgy method of parsing calendar data, to say the least. The calendar was stored on my computer in iCal format. I used KOrganizer to edit it and add my classes / schedule, and then used rsync to keep it up-to-date on the server. PHPiCalendar then parsed the iCal and generated RSS. I then used XML_RSS from PEAR to parse the RSS and yoink only the current event. That’s a lot of work to pick out the current item from my schedule!

I had been lazy for a couple weeks about sitting down and inputting my new classes. So today, I fired up Google Calendar and input my schedule items just for fun. It features XML and iCal export, so I thought I could hack up an equivalent version of the Where’s Seth? script using that.

I first tried just pulling the XML data and parsing that with my script. However, it wasn’t RSS, but Atom. I didn’t feel like rewriting everything to handle Atom XML, so I then investigated the iCal format. Googling “PHP iCal parser” got nothing decent to turn up (I refuse to register at crappy sites to download questionable libraries), but searching for “parse iCal” showed a JavaScript solution. That still wasn’t ideal, but I read the comments of that blog entry to find that there was a WordPress iCal parser! It was easily to grab and install, but it only showed events that had already passed. So I hacked it up a little bit to accept feeds from multiple iCals and to only show an event if one was currently in progress; it only took about an hour from start to finish. And now I have a slick Google Calendar that I’ll be a lot more likely to keep updated than I did the silly local iCal :D

This, my friends, is Stalking Done Right™.

Dewdles by Sam