Current mood:	accomplished
Entry tags:	icalendar, perl, twitter

Using backupmytweets.com to add Twitter stream to Google calendar
It's been bothering me that twistory.net doesn't show my whole Twitter stream. backupmytweets.com is an excellent free service, but they don't generate iCalendar format. So I tweeted to both, challenging them to solve my problem. No joy. Then today I woke up at 3am with an idea. I don't need a mashup. All I had to do was use my XML backup to generate the iCalendar data! It was fun and only took me a few hours in Perl: bumtXML2ics.pl. I love the line in All About Steve about cruciverbalists creating crossword puzzles that have three attributes: they're solvable, they're entertaining, and they sparkle. My Perl script was like that for me.

I hadn't bothered to upload my backups to my Website, but getting Google calendar to work motivated me, because it requires a URL to subscribe to. I guess I could import directly, but I like the way Twistory does it. So now my stream is available in the following formats: HTML, XML, JSON, and iCalendar. The link to my stream in a format that Google calendar can subscribe to looks like this: www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=http://home.pcisys.net/%7Etbc/09/twitter.tbc0.ics. Thanks for the idea, Twistory!

Technorati tags: twitter, icalendar, perl.