Of all the things Google Calendar is good for, producing a single embedded calendar from a set of Google Calendars has not been one of them…
[Cue sideaways glance] Or so I thought…
In a flurry of activity earlier today, the Reverend posted this:
while I was admiring the new link to UMW Blogs on the UMW homepage, I clicked on the Events link, and to my surprise it was a Google calendar. Wow! Who knew? When looking at the source code, I released it was actually an aggregation of 10 different Google Calendars–all the more fascinating.
Jim went on: “I did a search for the term “UMW” through Google’s public calendars and found over 40″ and the describes subscribing to the calendars, looking at them in the single aggregated view within Google Calendar itself, before hitting a problem: “Google won’t given me an embed code for the aggregation of all of the public calendars I subscribed to around UMW”
Err… rewind one moment… “When looking at the source code, I released it was actually an aggregation of 10 different Google Calendars“…?
This is what Jim saw but didn’t see:
Got it yet?
Take these two calendars, discovered by searching the Public Calendars in Google Calendar:
- Snooker Championships Listing (some events are listed over the next four months or so).
- Formula One Grand Prix listings for 2009 (the events start during March, 2009).
Now look through to March on this calendar: aggregated calendar view. It shows events from both calendars in the same view.
So what we have here is an aggregated calendar view that can be used to display several (that is, multiple) Google calendar feeds in a single view. To embed the calendar in your own page, just stick it in an iframe.
For each extra calendar feed, just add &src=CALENDAR_ID to the URL. The CALENDAR_ID will probably be of the form:
jabqnchvht5r2pjv0haqlg1j8s%40group.calendar.google.com
PS I did wonder whether I could add the aggregated calendar view as a single calendar to my Google Calendar. It seems not:
That is, it looks like each calendar feed will be added separately, rather than as a single, combined calendar.
But while that would have been a “nice to have”, the ability to display events from multiple Google calendars in a single calendar view in such a straightforward way is probably a big enough win anyway:-)
PPS aren’t comments wonderful (thanks Steve:-) – it seems thaqt you can generate the combined embed code within Google Calendar… Subscribe to the calenders you want to display, then go to the calendar settings:
Select the “Customise the color, size and other options” in the “Embed the Calendar” area:
And then select the calendars you want to include:
Simple:-)
I had to do something similar for a set of Google calendars recently and did it through the GUI (Calendar settings > Customize the color, size, and other options > Calendars to Display).
The resulting embed code is the same as shown in your post, but might be a bit easier to produce.
Users get the option to show/hide each calendar in the aggregated, embedded view.
Steve
@steve thanks – duly added to the post :-)
Tony,
I have to thank your network, I had no idea, and now I know. I feel stupid, but I also feel rich as kings. So thank you much. And while I see the option in Google Calendars now, the question of aggregation ical from a series of different calendars remains the next step in my mind. Need we ask everyone to use Google? Etc.
Anyway, thanks for go the extra yeard, and sorry for overlooking the obvious twice :)
@jim I think you can use 30boxes to aggregate up to 3 ical feeds (or a mixed economy of RSS and ical feeds): http://30boxes.com/boxed
e.g. here are Stanford Lectures and Film ical feeds in the same calendar: http://tinyurl.com/5zterq
and here’s the form where I built that calendar:
http://tinyurl.com/6jjdjb
I’ll do a quick post on this later today.
After stripping the iFrame out, I found that I had to convert all the “&” to “&” in order to use the Google generated code as a stand alone link. Otherwise it would produce a blank calendar.
Google generated:
Just stripping the iframe out produces a blank calendar:
http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?height=600&wkst=1&bgcolor=%23FFFFFF&src=han28112iat1harnqd9qaqv1l8%40group.calendar.google.com&color=%23528800&ctz=America%2FNew_York
Stripped and formatted to use as a stand alone link, including colors:
http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?showTitle=1&title=Snooker%3A%20Calendar
&showTabs=1&width=540&height=420
&wkst=1&mode=MONTH&ctz=America%2FNew_York&bgcolor=%23FFFFFF
&src=han28112iat1harnqd9qaqv1l8%40group.calendar.google.com&color=%23528800
That should say convert all the & to &
ahhhh, this keeps stripping things out of my comments!
remove all the “amp;” from after the “&” sign, and everything works as a link.
This appears to have broken with the 7/29/09 google apps release… are you seeing an error now?
Thanks for this critical info. We have been using HTML Calendaring for our site and I have wanted this functionality out of Google Calendar. I greatly appreciate it!
Brandt – you are my hero – that is exactly what I was looking for. I am using embedded calendars showing multiple calendars but some mobile browsers don’t support the iframe, so they were locked out of the calendar.
Now with what you mentioned about swapping out the ampersand codes with real ampersands, which creates a standalone link, I can check for mobile browsers and deliver the stand alone link to them.