At the top of my wishlist: a good RSS calendaring tool that would let me share my whereabouts with friends, family and well-wishers. (If anyone has a technology that can specifically exclude ill-wishers, so much the better.) The absolute minimum that I need is something that outputs my upcoming travels and conferences as an RSS feed that I can stick in a “where’s Alex?” section of my sidebar.
That’s what I thought I’d get from RSSCalendar.com. (Hell, they’ve got the URL right, and that’s a start.) RSS Calendar is what it says it is: a calendar that lets you add events, share them with friends (it lets you set different privacy levels for different events — good idea!) and then (so the site promises) add the resulting RSS output to your web site via a single line of code.
But I never got that far because I reached the point of exasperation way before then.
No, it wasn’t when I realized that the site was based on categories instead of tags (d’oh!). Here’s one place I’d think tagging would be a no-brainer: after all, I don’t want to have to put BlogHer in either conferences OR travel OR technology: I want it in all three. But RSS Calendar lets you pick only one — not a great move, but believe it or not I actually found it within myself to pardon this shortcoming and plow ahead.
Which is how I had the opportunity to discover that RSS Calendar limits events to a single day! That’s just madness. I want to mark down our upcoming two-week trip to San Francisco as a single event — not as fourteen day-long events. So that’s when I gave up.
The upside of that downside is that it now leaves me free to troll for a better option. What would RSS calendaring look like if it were done right? Well ideally it would include:
- multiple privacy levels, customizable by event
- option of e-mailing people to invite them to events if they’re not RSS users (even I have yet to break off social relations with the non-RSS world)
- integration with (cough cough) Entourage or Outlook for those of us who are weak-minded followers of the leading desktop calendaring options
- tagging of events (including options for multiple tags)
- RSS feeds for all scheduled events or for specific tags (so that I could post on my blog only events I tag “public”)
- inbound aggregation of other RSS feeds so I can subscribe to my husband’s, colleagues’, and friends’ calendars and see when we can potentially intersect.
Does anyone have a tool or tools to nominate that could — singly or in combination — do the job? Other candidates I’m investigating: PHP iCalendar (which works with iCal) and Upcoming.org (which turns out to be for scheduling public events, not tracking personal whereabouts.)
I’m also going to poke into some of the options listed on the evnt wiki. Trumba looks promising but is non-free.
So, monket-calendar (http://www.monket.net/wiki/monket-calendar/) is not quite what you are asking but promise a lot about rss and things. Maybe it can be integrated with others…
So, monket-calendar (http://www.monket.net/wiki/monket-calendar/) is not quite what you are asking but promise a lot about rss and things. Maybe it can be integrated with others…
You could try looking into Airset. I just started playing around with it today and I think it will do what you describe.
http://www.airset.com/index.jsp
You could try looking into Airset. I just started playing around with it today and I think it will do what you describe.
http://www.airset.com/index.jsp
I have used Airset for several weeks and love it.
I have used Airset for several weeks and love it.
Cameron and I have talked about the concept of RSS based calendaring and contact services on our podcast The Personal Productivity Show.
We had a look at RSScalendar and RSScontact, and while both are good starts, we found that neither are there yet. Integration to desktop apps like Outlook, either now or in the future, will be mandatory. The drive to mobility is not about carrying gadgets, its about having access to our data. Thats why converged devices like the Treo or the O2 XDA IIi (I currently use one) are promising. But fact is that no matter where we are, we just want to get access to our information.
Having it in the cloud, and on your desktop and on your PDA and your phone, etc, is the goal. An RSS feed of the data is a great application.
Thanks for the tip – I’ll take a look at Airset myself.
Cameron and I have talked about the concept of RSS based calendaring and contact services on our podcast The Personal Productivity Show.
We had a look at RSScalendar and RSScontact, and while both are good starts, we found that neither are there yet. Integration to desktop apps like Outlook, either now or in the future, will be mandatory. The drive to mobility is not about carrying gadgets, its about having access to our data. Thats why converged devices like the Treo or the O2 XDA IIi (I currently use one) are promising. But fact is that no matter where we are, we just want to get access to our information.
Having it in the cloud, and on your desktop and on your PDA and your phone, etc, is the goal. An RSS feed of the data is a great application.
Thanks for the tip – I’ll take a look at Airset myself.
I’m curious as to whether Des even used the product. I set up an account today for the first time, added about 20 events (soccer matches in the area) and then sent the link to myself. When I opened it up in my RSS Aggregator, I was able to add the events I was interested in to my Outlook calender with a single click. It’s August 13th in Missouri. Maybe Des has a wayback machine? The advantage I see to this product is that my users can choose to use an aggregator, Outlook or iCal or they can go to my site where I hope to have a weekly calendar up on my sidebar shortly. As soon as I can find a WP plug-in I know has to be out there. Found this site first and couldn’t let Personal Productivity advice like this go uncommented.
I’m curious as to whether Des even used the product. I set up an account today for the first time, added about 20 events (soccer matches in the area) and then sent the link to myself. When I opened it up in my RSS Aggregator, I was able to add the events I was interested in to my Outlook calender with a single click. It’s August 13th in Missouri. Maybe Des has a wayback machine? The advantage I see to this product is that my users can choose to use an aggregator, Outlook or iCal or they can go to my site where I hope to have a weekly calendar up on my sidebar shortly. As soon as I can find a WP plug-in I know has to be out there. Found this site first and couldn’t let Personal Productivity advice like this go uncommented.
Hi All
Thanks for the link to Airset – its pretty good. Close to what I was describing above
Best wishes
Des
Hi All
Thanks for the link to Airset – its pretty good. Close to what I was describing above
Best wishes
Des