GreaseDoggy - copy events from web pages to your Cosmo calendar
iwanttoseethat.com is a cute little site that lets you and your friends flag the movies you want to see and plan events to go to those movies together. A group of us used the site to organize an outing Friday night for The Golden Compass. Very nice, I like.
The next step after planning a movie night is of course to put it on my calendar. It would be handy if iwanttoseethat had a button that I could click to automatically add it to my Cosmo calendar at Chandler Hub. As it stands, I have to load my calendar in the browser and manually enter the details, copying them from the iwanttoseethat page. That's a minute of time I could be using to update my Facebook status!
A couple weeks ago we came up with a little Cosmo hack called GreaseDoggy that helps save me that minute. It's a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that detects event information in web pages and presents just such a button to stick an event on a Cosmo calendar.
In order for the script to find an event in a web page, the event data has to be marked up with hCalendar, a microformat for calendar data. It doesn't seem like many people know much about microformats yet, but some big web sites have caught on to hCalendar, like Upcoming and Eventful. hCalendar's really simple, and marking up the event info in a web page is a lot simpler than publishing a separate iCalendar resource describing each event. And imagine how much harder it would be to write a simple tool like this if it had to process a bloated steaming sack of iCalendar. So hopefully tools like GreaseDoggy will help increase the awareness of microformats and get web site authors using them to enable simple but awesome uses like this.
Of course now that I can one-click add events to my calendar from web pages, I want GreaseDoggy to detect more types of data. A Cosmo calendar is really just a collection of items that can be marked ("stamped") as events, tasks, and/or mail messages. I'd love to be able to copy a message from GMail into my calendar so that later I can mark it as a task and give it a due date or whatever. And maybe someday we can migrate from a Greasemonkey script to a full-fledged Firefox extension so that we can present a real UI for configuration, hook into right-click context menus, and so on.
But in the meantime, if you find GreaseDoggy useful, hound web page authors to mark up their events so the script can find them. And let me know so I can convince my boss to let us spend more time on fun tools like this.
The next step after planning a movie night is of course to put it on my calendar. It would be handy if iwanttoseethat had a button that I could click to automatically add it to my Cosmo calendar at Chandler Hub. As it stands, I have to load my calendar in the browser and manually enter the details, copying them from the iwanttoseethat page. That's a minute of time I could be using to update my Facebook status!
A couple weeks ago we came up with a little Cosmo hack called GreaseDoggy that helps save me that minute. It's a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that detects event information in web pages and presents just such a button to stick an event on a Cosmo calendar.
In order for the script to find an event in a web page, the event data has to be marked up with hCalendar, a microformat for calendar data. It doesn't seem like many people know much about microformats yet, but some big web sites have caught on to hCalendar, like Upcoming and Eventful. hCalendar's really simple, and marking up the event info in a web page is a lot simpler than publishing a separate iCalendar resource describing each event. And imagine how much harder it would be to write a simple tool like this if it had to process a bloated steaming sack of iCalendar. So hopefully tools like GreaseDoggy will help increase the awareness of microformats and get web site authors using them to enable simple but awesome uses like this.
Of course now that I can one-click add events to my calendar from web pages, I want GreaseDoggy to detect more types of data. A Cosmo calendar is really just a collection of items that can be marked ("stamped") as events, tasks, and/or mail messages. I'd love to be able to copy a message from GMail into my calendar so that later I can mark it as a task and give it a due date or whatever. And maybe someday we can migrate from a Greasemonkey script to a full-fledged Firefox extension so that we can present a real UI for configuration, hook into right-click context menus, and so on.
But in the meantime, if you find GreaseDoggy useful, hound web page authors to mark up their events so the script can find them. And let me know so I can convince my boss to let us spend more time on fun tools like this.
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