For a while now, I’ve been wanting to connect the wealth of musical performance schedules on MySpace to the elmcity calendar project. For example, here’s the MySpace page for Jatoba, three young guys from Brattleboro whose eclectic, high-energy, acoustic string instrumentals and vocals have inspired me the couple of times I’ve seen them around town.
As is typical, there’s a calendar on their page. So I should be able to plug its iCalendar feed — and more specifically, the Keene-based performances in that feed — into the Keene calendar hub. But MySpace doesn’t export iCalendar feeds. What to do?
Today I hit on a solution. Here’s the recipe:
1. Visit a band’s MySpace page:
2. Click the (view all) link on the calendar to arrive here:
3. Copy the URL of the (view all) page, paste it into FuseCal, arrive here:
4. Filter the list, arrive here:
5. Click the Add to my calendar bar, arrive here:
6. Click Other Calendar, arrive here:
That’s your iCalendar feed URL in the box. In this example, the feed contains just two entries for Jatoba’s two upcoming Keene performances. Here’s the first:
BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Public Display Inc//FuseCal Software//EN BEGIN:VEVENT URL:http://collect.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction= bandprofile.listAllShows&friendid=273136461&n=JATOBA SUMMARY:VENDETTA \, Keene\, New Hampshire - free DTSTART:20090507T213000 END:VEVENT
You can subscribe to that URL directly in your calendar program. If you’re an elmcity project curator, you’ll want to take one extra step to syndicate this calendar into your hub:
7. Bookmark the FuseCal URL.
Now Jatoba’s Keene performances will appear on the elmcity calendar, courtesy of FuseCal and Delicious. And neither MySpace nor Jatoba had to get involved. The web’s funny that way.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this while reading about your earlier local event aggregation efforts, but now that you’ve connected the dots for me…
I run a site that aggregates local concerts and makes them available in various formats, including iCal. Here’s the HTML and iCal versions we have for for Keene:
http://playinghere.com/NH/Keene/
webcal://playinghere.com/ical/NH/Keene/
We’re not tracking every band, of course, but we happen to be already tracking Jatoba’s shows. Right now the iCal is only location-specific, just because I haven’t gotten around to adding iCal for bands yet. But location-specific seems to be more what you’re going for anyway, as people in Keene don’t necessarily care if Jatoba is playing in Tokyo, right?
You can add any bands we’re missing here (pending manual review of each submission):
http://playinghere.com/submit/
I’d be happy to hear any feedback you have.
This reminds me of the Loose MP3 mashup and it’s just as valuable if not more so. I also notice that the band is playing “Funk ‘n Waffles” in Syracuse ;-) Thanks for posting this.
This is very cool, but I’m wondering if anyone has found a way to go the other way and create MySpace events from an iCal file or RSS feed. Thanks!