I had the following issue last week – I stumbled across a nice Google Calendar for the Romanian Public Holidays on Wikipedia and I wanted to import it on my own Google Calendar. And no, it wan’t so simple as I would have expected.
First, I tried clicking the “+ Google Calendar” button. This didn’t work, since I have a hosted Google Calendar (I use Google Apps for my domain – mybox.ro).
So I opened my Calendar and I clicked Add by URL. It asked me for the link to the iCal format of the calendar – which I didn’t have. Pasting the web-based calendar URL obviously didn’t work (Google fail! You mean I can’t import a Google Calendar into Google Calendar?!).
So I had to figure out what the URL of the iCal version was. It wasn’t that complicated, actually, I just had to create a public calendar and see what the URLs look like:
- Web based – the URL is http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=SOME-UNIQUE-ID
- iCal format – the URL is http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/SOME-UNIQUE-ID/public/basic.ics
SOME-UNIQUE-ID is the same, of course. So I just had to copy the unique ID from the link I found on Wikipedia and I could create this iCal URL which I could then import into my own Google Calendar.
It’s a 5 minute-hack, of course, but it’s still annoying that I had to do all this, when a simple “let’s detect if by chance the iCal version is also available” would have been better.
Image credit: Danny Hope.
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