Chowrasthas, traffic signals, bus-stops and traffic jams ...

Chowrasthas, traffic signals, bus-stops and traffic jams ...

Events-Calendars Confluence

One of the things I love about Bangalore is the wide range of cultural and technical fests and events that take place on almost an every day basis in different corners of the city. The impetus on art, especially music, both classical and western is remarkable. In the last 15 months alone, Bangalore has played host to some of the biggest rock bands like Iron Maiden, Aerosmith, INXS, Sepultura, while at the same time presenting an eclectic line-up of music artists from around the world like Frank Gambale and Maurizio Colonna who played at the Good Sheperd auditorium late last month.

The internet, of course plays up its role of harnessing all this information and delivering it to you, with the help of sites like this , to be used at your disposal.

When I come across a post about an event, which I might be interested in attending, here’s what I do.

1. I sign in to my Google calendar.
2. Click on the “Create Event” link, on my events calendar.
3. I now enter the following information in the fields provided.
1. What -> Name of the event
2. When -> date of the event
3. Where -> Venue
4. Click on ‘Save’

Now, to come to the point I am trying to make.

With the plethora of information on events that go on around the city, it would be very neat if I could mark a specific event that I come across on a web-page, on my Google calendar directly with the click of a button.

There are multiple ways in which this could be achieved, but I’m guessing the easiest would be to create a widget, that resembled the Skype extension for Firefox, shown below

This widget would single sign on with my Google calendar, (using the relevant browser cookies), and use the APIs to directly mark the event.

A script would run on every web-page that picks out dates in different formats and uses some primitive intelligence to detect location information, and other "event-attributes", and render the widget for the collection of this information.
A click on the widget would now enable this information to be written directly to the calendar. Optionally, in case of multiple calendars, the widget would even give a drop down of available calendars, and allow the user to select one of them.
In this scenario, ideally, of course, you would want to mark one of the calendars as the default, instead of prompting the user to select one, every time he wants to mark an event.