That Not So Fresh Feeling

Hey, I made a small revision to my Greasemonkey script that makes it smarter about handling time (particularly AM/PM).

It’s updated here and updated on Userscripts, where I’m up to like 566 installs! I’m a hit! Or something. And I’m like the 4th link in Google if you search for “google calendar evite!”

If you’ve got Greasemonkey, install your Evite to Google Calendar script right from here.

I got my first Evite in a while, and I noticed that my little Greasemonkey script wasn’t working for it. That lead me to go back and check out the entry at Userscripts and find out that people were getting bit by the fact I had to hard code the timezone info, which isn’t very friendly.

So, I opened it up again and hacked around and fixed both bugs. Took me about 30 minutes, and got my mind off of recent events.

Evite2GoogleCal at Userscripts

Now with:

• the ability to use it for invites that happened on the 1-9th of the month (yeah, that was a dumb bug)!
• automagically detecting your timezone and setting the entry to the right time!

Be the 191st person to install it!

I went to check out my Evite To Google Calendar script page at Userscripts, since I like to poke in every once in a while and see if anyone is actually using my script.  Last I had checked I had about 4 downloads.

Today: 64! 64 people have installed it. That’s pretty cool. Granted, that’s not a ton, but it’s a lot more than before! I left a comment, since I’m hoping someone will follow up and let me know if anyone really finds it useful.

After now having at least 2(!) people besides myself using the little Greasemonkey script I wrote to allow quick adding of Evite invites into Google Calendar, I’ve finally added my script to userscripts. Maybe I’ll eventually have 10 people using it. Then I’ll be famous. And maybe rich.

I got a nice trackback from the arc of time blog on my earlier post about creating a crappy little Greasemonkey script to let me quickly add Evite events into my Google Calendar. What that reminded me of was the fact that the script didn’t work for events that didn’t have an end time (and also got messed up with the time change).

Well, I fixed it. And now you can download the new version of the script that will let you, at least as far as far as I’ve tested, add any Evite directly into your Google Calendar. If there’s an end time, it’ll be set. If there’s not, your start and end time will be the same, but you can quickly tweak that.

It all seems to work.

To use it, I’m assuming you have Greasemonkey. If not, go get it.

Then, install this user script: Evite to Google Calendar

That’s it. Go to any open Evite. You’ll see a column on the left that looks like the image below.

Note the link circled in red. That’s what the script adds. Click that. You’ll be whisked away to Google Calendar where you can quickly add the event and be done with Evite.

Again, I think it works. It at least works on what I’ve tested it on. Give it a shot. Let me know. If you like it, link to my blog so I can be the coolest.

I’ve been using Google Calendar for a while now. It’s not perfect, since I can’t sync it with my home and work Outlook calendars. That would be perfect (have GCal do a bi-directional sync with Outlook), but in the interim, the fact that I can have my calendar send me SMS alerts and have it automagically pick up calendar items from GMail are enough to make it worthwhile for me.

The only annoying thing has been the fact that Evite (which is still really widely used) doesn’t have a “add this event to your Google Calendar” link in their interface, and I’m guessing, probably never will, as GCal has some Evite-like functionality, and Evite probably views that potential loss of ad revenue as too big of a risk. I won’t debate the validity of that argument, but simply say that I was getting frustrated at having to hand copy events from Evite to GCal.

I’d remember that I’d always want to write my own Greasemonkey script. For those unfamiliar with Greasemonkey, it’s a Firefox extension that allows you to insert content/functionality into an existing website. For instance, until Gmail added a delete button (a ridiculous UI oversight), there were numerous Greasemonkey scripts that let you add your own delete button. Pretty cool stuff. There’s thousands of scripts out there, most of which are just designed to increase the usability/functionality of some of the most popular web sites.

So I started hacking. It took me a while to get my brain back up-to-speed on Javascript, and then it took me even more time to work through all the hoops I needed to in order to get the info out of the Evite interface and into one that Google Calendar would like. After a few hours of hacking, my crude code was working. I had a nice link in the left-hand “tools box” on Evite, right under the “Add to Outlook” link that says “Add to Google Calendar.” When you click it, you get a Google Calendar Add Event page, with the data pretty filled.

So, I thought I’d share the script, for those who have wanted to do the same thing. It’s available right here:

Evite to Google Calendar Greasemonkey Script

If you take a look at the code, you’ll notice is really, really, really hacky. I wasn’t quite smart enough to come up with an elegant way of translating the human friendly Evite time to less human friendly Google Calendar URL time. I tried some of the built-in Javascript UTC time conversion functions, but they weren’t having any of it. So I hacked my way around it.

I’ve already noticed one bug — if you don’t have a defined start and end time, it won’t create the link at all. I’m not sure how I’ll handle that (probably check to see if there’s a “to”, and if so, define the end time), but for now, it’ll cover the majority of invites with a start and end time.

I think.

I’ll gladly take any suggestions, improvements, bugfixes people want to send my way. Like I said, this is one of the hackiest hacks that ever hacked a hack, and it’s very likely that much of what I did was stupider like a fox.

If you find it useful, please let me know. I’ll at least use it until Evite decides to add it themselves.