BIDA Calendar iCal Feed

February 5th, 2025
bida, contra, tech
A while ago I played around with manually generating iCal feeds for events, encoding the BIDA's regular schedule (1st and 3rd Sundays back then, with a more complex pattern for family dances and open bands) as in a machine-readable format. This was a fun project, but it didn't work very well: it didn't have any way to handle cancellations, special events, or other one-off adjustments to the schedule.

Still, having events automatically show up on calendars is great, and after Jeff Keller asked I decided to put something together.

Here's the feed: bidadance.org/events.ics. You can add it in Google Calendar by going to "Other Calendars" > "+" > "From URL":

And then pasting in the calendar URL:

Here's the next afternoon contra I'm able to attend, showing up on my phone:

For the actual implementation a script reads in the machine-readable list of scheduled events (dances.js). This is a bit more awkward that it could be, since the list is essentially JSONP and not pure JSON, so it needs to do a little hacky parsing. Then it interprets the records and uses the icalendar package to build in iCal file. Dates, times, and libraries can all be a bit tricky when they're an area you don't work in much, and I found Claude to be pretty helpful here.

I also set up a cron job (script) that looks for changes each hour and if so checks them in.

Let me know if you see any problems with it!

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, mastodon, bluesky, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

The One That I Want Another Sister

I want a baby sister or brother. Because I want to play with another kid, and I don't want to play with Josie because she is in preschool and I won't play with her very often. So I want to play with someone very often who is not just two people. …

via Nora Wise's Blog Posts September 5, 2026

Linkpost for September

On September 19 and 20, Sparrow Infrastructure is putting on The Overhang, a conference in Washington D.C.

via Thing of Things September 4, 2026

Ed Zitron's AI prediction track record

I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress posi…

via Posts on September 1, 2026

more     (via openring)