TechLifeWeb

I’m using Google+ quite a bit lately so I forget to look at Facebook and see my friends’ birthdays. Even if you aren’t using Google+, calendars are great for planning upcoming events and Facebook doesn’t put upcoming birthdays in a nice calendar format. Fortunately Facebook provides us with a link usingthe webcal standard allow you to bring all your friends’ birthdays into Google Calendar. I’m focusing on Google Calendar here but same techniques should work for other programs such as Apple iCal and Microsoft Outlook.

First, log on to Facebook and click Events.

Next, at the bottom of the Events page, click on the Birthdays link.

A page showing all your Friends and their birthdays will show up. Scroll all the way to the bottom and click Export Birthdays.
A dialog box will pop up showing the webcal address to all the birthdays. Right click on the link and click Copy Link Address (different but similar wording in IE or Firefox).

Next, go to Google Calendar and the bottom of the left hand column click Add. Then Add by URL.

In the dialog that pops up, paste in the webcal URL you copied in the previous step. Then click Add Calendar.

After a pause of a few seconds or so you should see a new calendar called Friends Birthdays in your list of calendars on the right. You can page through your calendar and you should see all your friends and the day they were born. You can click on the colored drop down to the right of the calendar name to customize the colors or hide.

That’s it! Now if you want another calendar for you Facebook events, go back to Facebook and use the same process except use the export link at the bottom of the Events page.

I was thinking last night that it might be interesting to take your Tweets and put them on a calendar. Kind of a life stream with calendar integration. I do crazy stuff like this because it helps me learn.

I figured since Twitter outputs to RSS I could take that and morph it into an iCal feed. As it turns out, this isn’t that hard with Yahoo! Pipes. However, it isn’t really doesn’t work all that well. The problem is that Yahoo Pipes only polls the RSS every 30 minutes or so. So if you tweet a lot things will get missed. Also, it will only hold the last 20 tweets at the time of polling. And then there is the calendar the polls iCal. I have no idea how often that happens.

So, this is just a proof of concept kind of thing. I thought since I got this bit figured out I’d release it and see if anyone else comes up with something better.

Here is how it works:

• Go to: http://pipes.yahoo.com/techlifeweb/twitterical
• Enter your twitter name (public accounts only, sorry) in the box provided and click Run Pipe
• When the results com back, click More options and right click on Get as iCal then click “Copy Link Location” in your browser.

You now have the link to the iCal version of your Tweet. How you set this up in your calendar varies on calendar application.  Here, we’ll use Google calendar.

• Open your Google Calendar
• In the lower left click ‘add’ 
• and then ‘Add by URL’
• When the dialog box pops up, past in the iCal URL you copied in the steps above and click Add Calendar.

It will take a few seconds to a minute and they you will see your last 20 tweets in your calendar. You can change the colors if you want.

So, developers out there, if you do something cool with this, please let me know.

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