Muffinresearch Labs by Stuart Colville

SXSWi 2008 ical schedule | 18 Comments

Posted in Events on 23rd February 2008, 10:46 pm by

Updated panels calendar 8/3/2008

SXSWi will be upon us faster than a group of web devs heading to the bar. This year to liven things up a bit I’m heading there with Cyril Doussin and Tristan Turpin via Houston and San Antonio before we hit Austin at some point on the Thursday. After which I’ve no doubt you’ll find me attempting to take on the locals at the foosball tables.

This will be my third time in Austin for SXSWi and I couldn’t agree more with the “Guide to SXSW for newbs and veterans”. One thing in particular is to not worry in the slightest about which panels you do or don’t make it to. Best to work out the few you like the sound of, relax and if you don’t find yourself where you though you’d be, just swing by one of the other rooms. Sometimes the most interesting panels are the ones that you just wander into.

The same goes for the evening events, the more unplanned the better :-)

So to assist in unplanning your SXSW I’ve hacked together a ical file for all of the SXSW interactive events using the rather brilliant Beautiful Soup HTML parser.

After downloading the main SXSWi 2008 schedule page, Beautiful soup made it trivial to grab all of the links for the sessions, so that I could then fetch the page for each panel (with a little judicous caching) and then use Beautiful soup again to extract all the necessary details from the markup which contains hcal microformatty goodness. I then wrote this out to a file and the job’s a good’un.

You can either subscribe to the sxswi08 panel schedule ical (.ics) file here OR download it to your desktop as a zip.

Fortunately the evening events page is just a page full of microformats so extracting that to an ical file is a lot more straightforward by using Brian Suda’s x2v – so here’s the sxswi evening events ical (.ics) file and archived as a zip.

If you notice any problems with either ical file then be sure to let me know so I can fix it up.

Lastly if you’re heading over to Austin for SXSWi be sure to say Hi.

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  • http://www.simonjobling.com Si Jobling

    I’ve not heard of Beautiful Soup before but it certainly sounds like I could do with having a look into how it works for a couple of my projects I have lined up this year.

    You’re going to have to take me through it though – my Python skills are non-existant!

  • http://www.flow14.com/blog Kyle

    Excellent! I’ve been looking for just such a calendar — thanks!

  • http://morethanseven.net Gareth

    Mmm. Beautiful soup comes second only to the Universal Feed Parser in my all time favourite Python modules list.

    See you in Austin if not next week in London. Thanks for the links, I’ve virtually no idea about what goes on or what to do and I wasn’t even going along until yesterday so have lots to catch up on.

  • http://www.callendercreates.com Jim Callender

    Great, thanks and see you at the bar, stateside..

  • http://antonpeck.com Anton

    This is brilliant. I now have it all synced up on a portable device so that I can review the schedule in-hand while walking the halls. Love it!

  • http://www.w3conversions.com Stephanie Sullivan

    This is awesome! Thanks so much… The evening calendar comes down as a zip. But the daytime schedule has both the linking to the .ics. I’m gonna guess a the name of the zip and see if I can find it, but though you should know. :)
    Stef.

  • http://muffinresearch.co.uk Stuart Colville

    @Stephanie: Cheers for the heads up, I’ve fixed the links.

  • http://www.w3conversions.com Stephanie Sullivan

    So I got it all put into my iCal (which I admit, I don’t usually use — I’m a google calendar gurl)… and it’s awesome. Except everything is an hour off of it’s real time.

    Any of you geniuses know what I need to do to make it right? (I’m on the east coast of the US if that matters.)

    Ciao,
    Stef.

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  • http://muffinresearch.co.uk Stuart Colville

    @Stephanie: The time-zone information is set to that of Austin Texas which is Central Standard Time. If your clock is set to CST you should find the timings are all correct. Also note that Daylight Saving Time starts on the Sunday March 9th at 2.00am local time at which point the clocks are moved forward an hour.

  • http://www.communityguy.com Jake McKee

    Thanks so much for posting those links! I’ve subscribe and will be soon syncing to my iPhone. No more digging through the event program trying to figure out what is when and where. Now I can just remove the items I’m not interested in for sure, leaving me with a great selection of options.

    Thanks!

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  • http://cyril.doussin.name Cyril Doussin

    Both Beautiful Soup and this calendar rock. Thanks mate!

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  • Kyle

    Just so people know, some of the parties have the wrong times, and the panelists names are missing from the schedule. Still, this is a great resource for iPhone users, and one that SXSW should have provided on their own.

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Hat tip: mteckert on SuperUser.com

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