iCal Feed from Confer Likes - CSCW 2017

tl;dr Get your personalized CSCW schedule as an iCal feed.

CSCW uses the excellent Confer system to display the conference program, and I "Like" sessions to remind me of what I want to see. However, I also wanted to be able to see my personal schedule in my phone's calendar. So I built this little app that uses Confer's "liked" sessions to create a custom iCal feed that can be used by most popular calendaring programs. I'm making it available to anyone who wants to use it.

Use At Your Own Risk

A couple of caveats:

• This is not hardened code. I promise nothing and make no warranties that it will work. If it breaks and I can fix it easily, I will, but it would be best to prepare for disappointment.
• This is not secure. The Confer APIs use minimal security. I store your email address in plain text. It probably wouldn't be hard for someone else to spoof your login token and see your Confer schedule. That said, it's just your liked sessions, which hopefully isn't too sensitive.

Instructions

If you are OK with those caveats, do this:

1. Visit http://confer.csail.mit.edu/developer/allow_access?app_id=cscw2017_ical_favorites and grant the app access.
2. Input your e-mail address (the same one you use for Confer) and click submit (below).
3. Check your email. You will receive a custom URL for your personalized iCal feed.

Credits

This would not be possible without the hard work of the Confer team and their easy-to-use APIs. The code is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database and JSON formatted files.

This was written on a whim by Matt Bietz.

Known Bugs

• This app updates your favorites in real time, but some calendars (I'm looking at you, Google) cache the calendar data and only refresh periodically (in some cases, several hours to days). Not my fault.
• Given the way the API and the CSCW schedule works, Calendar entries are created at the session level, not the paper level. If you like one or more papers in a session, the whole session will be added to your calendar, and your liked papers will be marked with a *.
• The app uses cached versions of the conference schedules, so changes in venue or program may not be immediately updated. Let me know if you spot a discrepancy.
• Some times may get corrupted in the format conversions. I think I caught all the exceptions, but if you notice an AM/PM error, let me know.

If you run into problems or notice any other bugs, please email Matt at matt@bietz.me. Thanks!

CSCW Personalized iCal Feed by Matthew Bietz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.