After finally working out how to make the maps in Flock Together clickable, I’ve now also added the functionality to put Flock Together events automatically into Google’s newly launched Calendar. [For an example, check out the button at the bottom of this page or try the button below].
Unfortunately, Google don’t appear to support the RSS/xCal feed that I’ve been using for publishing events. They’ve published a fairly simple standard for entering individual events via a single URL (which I’m using), but to enter a series of events it looks like you need to provide an iCal feed or their own format of XML feed.
In a burst of enthusiasm last summer, I put the functionality into Flock Together to publish iCal feeds, but I’m a bit loath to switch it on. iCal feeds (or .ics files) tend to get opened by Outlook on many PCs and, as far as I can recall from when I last tried it, Outlook falls over if you ask it to open more than one event in a single file. It’s also not currently clear whether Google will index external feeds, so, unless there’s an immediate clamour to the contrary, I will wait and see how many people use the Google calendar service via Flock Together before taking things any further.
