Whomwah.com

I thought I’d do a spot of PR on some work we have just pushed out. I have written about it on the BBC Radio labs blog, so I’ll just be brief here.

Basically, we have added a bunch of iCalendar views of the /programmes data. You can for example subscribe to an iCal view of the 6 Music schedule, or episodes on the BBC that are coming up, that belong to the genre Sport/Golf. What this means is, that your calendar of choice would then display this information along with your regular calendar data. So you would know that:

• 09:00 Go Swimming
• 12:00 Lunch with Ellen
• 19:00 Gardeners World – BBC One London
• 21:00 Tom Robinson – BBC 6 Music

Pop along to the link above and check them out for yourself, I’d be interested to here what you think are good .. or bad about them. Below is a screen-grab of some subscriptions as seen in Google Calendar.

[UPDATE]: Just want to be clear on the webcal and http parts of the url. If you are using copying and paste to add the iCal link into Google Calendar, Apple’s iCal etc, then the link can start with http just like any other. If on the other hand you are providing the link for someone to click on, if you start it with webcal, and the user is on a machine that understands what that means (Mac and PC if you configure it) it will do the right thing. If you’re not sure, use http://…etc.

David P Thomas has been collecting Ruby one-liners and sticking them in a single text file for us all to enjoy. The list looks like it hasn’t been touched in a while but has has proven to be very useful for me.

Shame it’s in a .txt file as finding the ones that would be helpful requires memorising them all, or searching through and hoping to find the one you’re after. Great stuff all the same though.