Scrape to calendar

October 4, 2011 10:31 AM

How do I scrape and aggregate to an online calendar?

I hope this is different enough from a recent question. Mine was inspired by this:
http://ask.metafilter.com/197617/How-do-I-scrape-information-from-a-website

I have a site about free events and stuff in my city: http://freealbuquerque.com/

It includes a list of free events, using Google calendar, which I am not married to. I get most of the events from just a few sites:
http://www.rei.com/stores/30
http://albuq.cabq.gov/iii/calendar/month
http://www.itsatrip.org/events/default.aspx
https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=[e-mail]&ctz=America/Denver&gsessionid=OK

A couple of these sites have only free events, but a couple do not. A couple of the pages require me to go a couple levels in to get the relevant info.

I’ve been doing this manually. Is there a better way?

I’m adequate with HTML and CSS, have played a little with Javascript, and have done some very basic programming exercises, now in Python.

posted by maurreen to Technology (2 answers total)

Best answer: Dapper is your new best friend. It lets you create structured feeds scraped from webpages without a line of code. Just click the areas you want, describe them, and it gives you a feed.

I made this iCal feed of the REI events in about three minutes, but you can turn it into whatever you like. iCal is easily importable into your calendar of choice, including Google Calendar.
posted by waxpancake at 11:02 AM on October 4, 2011 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks! That looks good.
posted by maurreen at 11:24 AM on October 5, 2011