Looking to add a calendar to your agency or municipality Web site? Look no further! Learn about the iCal standard adopted by RI.gov, as well as stragegies for adding calendar and event information to your site.
iCal is an open standard for calendar and event data, made famous by Apple's iCal application. It also often reffered to as ICS, or iCalendar. Many other applications, Web sites and online services have also adopted the iCal standard, including Travelocity, Yahoo, Microsoft Outlook, Facebook and Google. As a result, iCal has quickly become an easy way to share calendar information over the Web.
By using any of the options listed above, you can quickly create a calendar that can be shared, edited or viewed by others. One of the easiest ways is with a Google account. By adding events to the Google Calendar application (part of the Google suite of applications), you can quickly share that calendar as and XML feed.
Once you have your XML feed cooking, contact RI.gov, and have your feed converted to an iCal and RSS feed, hosted by the portal. Once this is taken care of, you can easily display calendar events on your Web site, (as you can with RSS feeds now), as well as provided an iCal button on your Web page that visitors can click on to easily subscribe to your automatically.
In other words, enter your events once, publish everywhere. Whether your calendar is Google, iCal Outlook or 30boxes, send us your iCal feed and we can help you take it from there.