Jenny said:

Phil, how did you create the vcs file??!! I've wanted to learn how to automatically generate these in our online calendar at work, but I don't know enough about vCalendar.

Imagine these puppies flowing through your news aggregator at work!

Part 1. Recipe.

How did I do this? Manually, for now.

 Click here to add this event to your Outlook or Netscape calendar.

 

1. I posted two graphics to my blog:
• vcalendar.gif
• vcalendarsmall.gif (the one I used)
  
2. I created a Radio shortcut. vcalsmall. for the picture.
• <IMG height=28 alt="Click here to add this event to your Outlook or Netscape calendar." hspace=0 src="http://dijest.com/aka/images/2002/06/16/vcalendarsmall.gif" width=24 align=left border=0>
   
3. I created the event in Palm.
• You can do this in your Palm Pilot or from the Palm Desktop. I think Palm Desktop is free, and it works with or without a Palm Pilot.
• Open the calendar.
• Type the event name into a time block.
• Right/Option-click to add a note.
   
4. Create the vCalendar file.
• Selecting the new event, File | Export vCal...
• Save the file as a Radio gem (I created a gems/events folder)
• Naming: I try to start with the yyyymmdd format to:
• make it easy to sort events on my hard disk
• avoid duplication of similar events.
• Should have the .vcs extension. It is a text file; you can read it in notepad.
• You can tweak it in your text editor, but shouldn't have to.
   
5. Upstream the event file.
    
6. Refer to it in a post. Outlook and Netscape Calendar claim the .vcs extension, so the browser knows to open your event with it.

Using Outlook?  You can do steps 3 and 4 with a few differences.

Outlook has an Action | Forward vCalendar command, but you have to save the attachment to your hard drive.

Part 2. Futures.

I'd like to:

• add one or more events to a post, with fields like start date, time, end date, time, etc.
• see them as part of the post on my web site
• have them flow out through RSS
• sort a category by event-start-date instead of by post date

I've been working on adding attributes to Radio blog posts. Still learning the basics of the various callbacks, frontier syntax, how renderers work and build on each other.