=head1 NAME On the ... which day again?!? =head1 AUTHOR David Westbrook =for advent_year 2007 =for advent_day 1 =for advent_title On the ... which day again?!? =for advent_author David Westbrook gcal Is your true love forgetful? Well, here's a little reminder to him or her for your twelve days of gifts. [L] Many things have a schedule of events or calendar of some kind. iCal (A) is the standard for people to share calendars with one another, and M provides perl with ability to both parse and generate calendar files. Have event information or dates stored in a database or just listed in a file? Export them out into an iCalendar .ics file to be read by your favorite (Sunbird, Google Calendar, Outlook, etc) calendaring application. =head2 Perl Advent Calendars Now, let's take all of the Perl Advent entries to date, going back to 2000. First, we'll scrape the A with the script L to create an AoH L data file. Now we can create our calendar file with a F script. [L] The resulting file is L which can be loaded as a remote calendar in your favorite application, as in these screenshots of L and L. For this holiday season, you can "open the window" each day by re-generating this year's (or really any year 2000-2007) events with a combination of the scraper and F scripts mentioned above. Or the simpler approach of just a few reminders on the calendar in the form of L generated by L. [L] =head2 Parsing example Using a calendaring application to maintain a personal or organization calendar? Want those events custom embedded in your web pages or application? F can parse the calendar file and provide easy access to the event data, such as taking our L and creating L. [L] This allows the full leveraging of established calendaring applications for maintaining calendars, reducing much wheel-reinvention, leaving more time for milk & cookies.
=head2 L This script generates L, shown in the Google Calendar screenshot above. Y =head2 L This script generates L from an AoH data file. Y =head2 L This script generates a calendar for a specific year from the Perl Advent Calendar archives. Y =head2 L This script generates L from an ICal file. Y