In case you hadn’t heard as of yet, Google has just released their newest concoction: Google Calendar. I’d recommend you go check it out — It has to be one of the coolest web 2.0 applications I have seen as of yet. Here’s the problem, you have to have an internet connection to check your calendar!
For many people this is not a problem because their computer never leaves their desktop, but for a more mobile user like myself, a solid wireless connection cannot always be found. That being said, let me give a little background information on my experience with calendar applications. In the past I have messed around with Outlook, Mozilla Calendar, and most recently Rainlendar. I really like rainlendar as it sits quite nicelyon the desktop without using up many system resources.
So, here’s the question I had: can I get Google Calendar and Rainlendar to play nicely together??? At first it looked like the answer was a definite no. The one promising feature of Rainlendar was an included extension which allows one to import and watch an local ical data file and synchronize the rainlendar calendar with that file. Google Calendar allows for one to subscribe to an online ical feed.
The problem: Rainlendar requires the ical file to be local and google only provides a web location for the ical file.
The solution: Wget, a simple command line application which allows one to download a file from a remote location to the local hard drive. Following are the steps I took to get a working Rainlendar/Google Calendar setup.
- If you haven’t already done so, get a Gmail account, and go check out Google Calendar.
- Also, you’ll want to download Rainlendar if you haven’t already done so.
- Download Wget and extract the files to a location on your hard drive that is easy to remember (I put mine under “program files/wget/”).
- Go onto Google Calendar => Settings => Calendars => (Your Calendar) and then click on the link for the private address of your ical feed. Copy the url; you will need this in a minute.
- Now, we are going to need to create a batch script to download the ical file to the local hard drive using wget. To do this, open up a text editor such as notepad and write a simple script resembling this one (modified as needed) and save it somewhere as a .bat file:
@echo off
"C:\Program Files\wget\wget.exe" -O "C:\mycalendar.ics" [address copied from Google Calendar]
You will need to replace the ‘%40′ in the google calendar address with ‘@’, the at character. - Now you have a script which should download your calendar to your hard drive whenever it is run. Try running the script to verify that it works. Now we want to set up Rainlendar to synchronize with this file. In the Rainlendar menus go to config => plugins => iCalendar Plugin => Settings and add your file. Your rainlendar calendar should now be updated to match your Google Calendar.
- The final step of the process is to keep our local calendar up to date with the changes made to our Google Calendar. All that is needed to do that is to periodically run the batch script we created. This can be done automatically using a Scheduled Task. To create a Scheduled Task navigate to Control Panel => Scheduled Tasks => Add Scheduled Task. Browse to select your .bat file and modify the task to run as frequently as you like (mine updates hourly).
And that’s all there is to it… The final product is a nicely updated local calendar which sits on my desktop which is stored online on Google Calendar.


