Google Calendar, Why You No iCal Sync?

August 9th 2011

Tags: python, utilities

For some reason I can't fathom, Google calendar doesn't refresh ical calendar feeds but once a week (if you're lucky). There are no controls to manually refresh a feed and if you remove and re-add a feed with the same URL, it will have the old data cached and won't bother to try and update it.

Google, I know you would love it if all I used was your products. Hell, I would love it if I could use Google calendar for work. I can't though, and for quite some time calendar syncing has been a thorn in my side.

Please Don't Ban Me

For better or worse I have taken to brute forcing an updated calendar. Using the gdata Python module and the following script, I am not so cleverly erasing a range of my work calendar, then mashing the same range pulled from a feed into said work (Google) calendar.

I don't necessarily need to run it very often, as my schedule only changes a few times a week, but still the Calendar api will sometimes barf and stop working for a minute or so. This is why the api calls are (potentially) attempted multiple times with some pauses thrown in for uh, safety.

This Is All Pointless

I can only barely understand the frustration of someone whose calendar feeds would change often. This has been an outstanding issue for Google calendar for years.

If I have the capability to force gmail to check for pop mail on my other older accounts, why can't there be the same feature for calendar feeds?

By Colin Kennedy