Add an ical feed, publishing our events

[BudgieInWA]

Because we have the source of truth for all our events stored as individual pages here, we should be able to add an ical feed that people can subscribe to in their calendars. The feed is just a single text file in the (awkward) ical format, so it might be as easy as dropping in a single file for Jekyll to render. Here is an example of just that: https://github.com/ct-martin/fossrit.github.io/blob/master/feeds/calendar.ics

[BudgieInWA]

This article might provide good troubleshooting details: https://sparrow0hawk.github.io/jekyll-calendar/

[samwilson]

In #56 I've started the process of switching to a uniform date/time format.

There seems to be an issue with storing the times in UTC though (see https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/6033 and linked issues), so it looks like we need to store them in AWST (and set timezone in the config file, which I've done in the above PR). I'm not 100% that will do everything we need for icalendar though, where we need to be able to calculate UTC (I'm hoping something like DTSTART:{{ page.start_time|date:"%s"|minus:28800|date:"%Y%m%dT%H%M%SZ"}} will do it, i.e. subtracting 8 hours from the Unix timestamp).

[BudgieInWA]

For iCalendar, we should use a 'DATE WITH LOCAL TIME AND TIME ZONE REFERENCE' like the example DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:19970714T133000.

[samwilson]

Ah that's better isn't it, then we don't have to convert the times at all but just reformat.

[BudgieInWA]

An .ics file has been deployed and working so far! I have my Google Calendar subscribed to it, and the events have come through perfectly. @samwilson thanks for setting start_time and end_time for all the events :)

@samwilson, @MaiaWilliams, @johnwbryant can you please test in any different calendar systems that you have? https://geogeeks.org/geogeeks.ics

Once it has been tested a bit, we can add links to the site.

[BudgieInWA]

BTW, I have ignored the suggestion that we "SHOULD" wrap lines at 75 octets, so we don't have to do any of the line-folding shenanigans. The validator also complains that the TZID /Australia/Perth is not described in the file by a VTIMEZONE entry, but starting the value with a slash tells clients that the id that follows is from an (unspecified) standard timezone database, so I'm pretty sure it will work everywhere.

[johnwbryant]

Just tried it in Google Calendar, imported 28 events. Seems to work?

[MaiaWilliams]

Works for me too :)

-------- Original Message -------- From: John Bryant @.> Sent: 19 November 2023 11:24:31 am AWST To: "geogeeks-au/geogeeks-au.github.io" @.> Cc: MaiaWilliams @.>, Mention @.> Subject: Re: [geogeeks-au/geogeeks-au.github.io] Add an ical feed, publishing our events (Issue #53)

Just tried it in Google Calendar, imported 28 events. Seems to work?

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[samwilson]

Looks great!

The URL field is not fully-qualified though, e.g.:

URL:/2023/1008_osm-beckenham.html

Everything else works great, and as I was already subscribed to /geogeeks.ics it all came through without me having to change anything (although I suspect I'm the only one who was already subscribed, from back in the day).

[BudgieInWA]

Linked from /events.html in #60.