iCal feeds from various venues in Deventer

Merely to scratch my own itch: I just want to have ical feeds from my favorite venues on my phone/desktop/etc w/o checking social media. (And maybe it's FOMO? :P)

There are venues who have a proper iCal feed:

• Meneer de Perifeer: https://perifeer.org/events.ics
• De Hip: https://www.dehip.nl/evenementen/?ical=1

The following sites have no proper iCal feeds (yet) so I provide them for you for free, e.g: "Free as in beer"¹

• Burgerweeshuis

  • JSON file: https://leipeleon.github.io/bwh-ical/bwh/events.json
  • iCal file: https://leipeleon.github.io/bwh-ical/bwh/events.ics

• Walhalla

  • JSON file: https://leipeleon.github.io/bwh-ical/walhalla/events.json
  • iCal file: https://leipeleon.github.io/bwh-ical/walhalla/events.ics

• Burnside

  • JSON file: https://leipeleon.github.io/bwh-ical/burnside/events.json
  • iCal file: https://leipeleon.github.io/bwh-ical/burnside/events.ics NOTE: Start / end times are estimates because there is no easy way to retrieve that information from the text (there is no HTML element with that information). Could this be my first opportunity to use AI? ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)

• GregOrIan calendar

  • iCal file: https://leipeleon.github.io/bwh-ical/greg_or_ian/events.ics inspired by https://mikecoats.com/the-greg-or-ian-calendar/

Todo (e.g wishlist):

• https://bijbuitenpost.nl/agenda/

This takes extra work: Although there is an upcoming page https://www.burgerweeshuis.nl/programma which list all upcoming events, the info is not complete. So I have to pound the webserver for each event entry in the page, this also takes time..... Scraping the index page isn't an option b/c it has an infinite scroll (whyyyyyyyyyy).

• Retreive data from the https://www.burgerweeshuis.nl/programma
• visit each url to fetch date / time / other details (the site takes another hit)
• save events to disk as a .json
• generate an ical feed to disk as a .ics
• deploy to GitHub pages w/ a github action cronjob, every hour

This site is easier. It's wordpress and uses the https://theeventscalendar.com/ plugin (I guess) But it hasn't activated any iCal export. Also it has dedicated "upcoming" and history pages so its easier to parse.

• scrape events from the pages
  • https://www.walhalla-deventer.nl/activiteiten/toekomstig/
  • https://www.walhalla-deventer.nl/activiteiten/afgelopen/?action=tribe_list&tribe_paged=1 To backfill my agenda with the past events, so I can see what happened yesterday, I'm also retrieving some history
• walk through events to extract date / time / other details
• save events to disk as a .json
• generate an ical feed to disk as a .ics
• deploy to GitHub pages w/ a github action cronjob, every hour

• For your OS:
  • install docker
  • install ruby (3.3.6 or higher)

Then in a terminal:

# Install dip a.k.a Docer Interaction Program (https://github.com/bibendi/dip)
gem install dip

# Build containers
dip provision

# execute the script
dip reader

Origin story:

There was a time when the Burgerweeshuis site had an iCal feed to be used in your digital calander, be it on your device, icloud, google calendar, etc. Unfortunately the new site doesn't provide such functionality AFAIK.

This project aimed to fill that gap.

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2024 Leon Berenschot

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.