{"id":3017,"date":"2014-01-19T23:07:30","date_gmt":"2014-01-19T23:07:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3017"},"modified":"2014-01-19T23:12:49","modified_gmt":"2014-01-19T23:12:49","slug":"creating-an-icalendar-from-online-timetables","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3017","title":{"rendered":"Creating an iCalendar from online timetables"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m a member of my local swimming pool, Fleming Park<\/a>. I’m trying to swim a lot at the moment (as it’s a big help for my back<\/a>). <\/p>\n

<\/a>I don’t have a regular schedule, I just try and squeeze in time for a swim any time I can spare. This means I’ve not learned the pool’s schedule and frequently have to check their website to find when the pool is available. <\/p>\n

I’m checking it so frequently that it’s one of my Most Visited thumbnails in Chrome. <\/p>\n

This isn’t efficient, particularly as it’s normally on my phone making me switch between the browser and Calendar apps. It’d be quicker and easier if I had the timetable in my calendar alongside my appointments, so I could easily see when I’m free and the pool is open. <\/p>\n

The leisure centre doesn’t provide a feed so I can subscribe and add their schedule to my calendar. <\/p>\n

So I made my own.<\/p>\n

dalelane.co.uk\/…\/swimflemingpark.ics<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

If you use the Fleming Park pool, import this<\/a> in your Calendar app (or subscribe to it from Google Calendar<\/a>) and the next week’s pool timetable will be kept up to date in your calendar. <\/p>\n

I’ve done it with a quick bit of Python hacking. I download the HTML source for the next seven days’ timetables, and parse each of them using BeautifulSoup<\/a>. I pick out the swimming session info, and generate an ics file for them using iCalendar for Python<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I’ve put it on my home media server<\/a>, and set up a cron job to run it every twenty-four hours, with a shell script to upload it to dalelane.co.uk\/files. <\/p>\n

It’s a quick hack, so it’s specific to Fleming Park. Although, at first glance at another similar-looking local pool website<\/a>, I think it’ll probably work on other DC Leisure Centre websites. <\/p>\n

The source for the script is on github<\/a>. <\/p>\n