munfred / gcaltech.com

Daily emails with events from the Caltech master calendar with links to add them to Google calendar

gcaltech.com

Daily emails with events from the Caltech master calendar with links to add them to Google calendar

The Python script gcaltech.py fetches the Caltech master calendar HTML (http://www.caltech.edu/master-calendar/day), parses the event info, then discards everything that is not the event tables. Then it creates an even in a public Google calendar for each event from the master calendar, and then replaces "add to ical" links from the original html with "add to google calendar" and corresponding links. Then it does some more html wrangling to make it look pretty.

Then it uses the mailchimp API to send the emails every time it's run. The script currently runs on a Google cloud free tier instance with a daily cron job.

Some references I found useful:

https://ironboundsoftware.com/blog/2018/02/25/daily-email-list-python-mailchimp/ https://developers.google.com/calendar/

Huge thanks to Will Graf for fixing the code after Caltech updated it's website and broke everything in February 2019. He taught me how to use .env files to not commit my secrets.

gcaltech.com's Issues

Website Redesign breaks calendar scraping

Looks like the calendar website was updated, causing the service to break.

Here's the new link for the site

I'm not sure if the HTML parsing will still work. If it is broken due to the redesign as well, I would be happy to help re-scrape the site (I'll probably convert to scrapy or requests + lxml)

Publish the night before instead of morning of

Could the email be adjusted to go out the night before so that we can appropriately plan for the next day?