ical export -> google calendar woes

ical export -> google calendar woes

[Neal Thomison]

All,

I'm experiencing one of those "the last 10% of the problem takes 90% of
the time" moments.

I'm doing a combined ical export over all of my .org files, which works
fine. I then copy the resulting .ics file off to my web server to which
I've pointed a Google calendar (an "add by url" calendar) which also
works, after a fashion. The irritation is that no matter what I try and
do, Google insists on seeing the calendar timezone as GMT, hence, all of
my appointments are appearing 4 hours early (my TZ is EST5EDT but EST or
"America/Indianapolis" or "America/Indiana/Indianapolis" all don't work
either). I've set 'org-icalendar-timezone' and I see X-WR-TIMEZONE set
correctly in the resulting .ics file.

As an experiment, I hand edited the exported .ics file and added a
"TZNAME: EST5EDT" before copying it up to my web server and it works
fine; my appointments are show at the correct times.

I've googled enough to know that there are fair number of people with a
lot of angst over the timezone support in gcal but this feels like a
much more pedestrian issue than what the bulk of those post are focusing
on.

Am I missing a config parameter somewhere? Do I need a special
incantation or naming convention when I do an "add by url"?

My setup is: emacs 24.0.50.2 and org-mode 7.01trans.

Thanks,
Neal

Re: ical export -> google calendar woes

[Rémi Vanicat]

Neal Thomison <neal.thomison3@verizon.net> writes:

> All,
>
> I'm experiencing one of those "the last 10% of the problem takes 90% of
> the time" moments.
>
> I'm doing a combined ical export over all of my .org files, which works
> fine. I then copy the resulting .ics file off to my web server to which
> I've pointed a Google calendar (an "add by url" calendar) which also
> works, after a fashion. The irritation is that no matter what I try and
> do, Google insists on seeing the calendar timezone as GMT, hence, all of
> my appointments are appearing 4 hours early (my TZ is EST5EDT but EST or
> "America/Indianapolis" or "America/Indiana/Indianapolis" all don't work
> either).

The patch I just send here
(http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/30207) should solve this
issue.


-- 
Rémi Vanicat

Re: ical export -> google calendar woes

[Rémi Vanicat]

Rémi Vanicat <vanicat@debian.org> writes:


[...]

> The patch I just send here
> (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/30207) should solve this
> issue.

Mmm sending mail too early....

With this patch you have to set org-icalendar-use-UTC-date-time to t
for it to work.
-- 
Rémi Vanicat

Re: ical export -> google calendar woes

[Neal Thomison]

Neal Thomison <neal.thomison3@verizon.net> writes:
> ... Google insists on seeing the calendar timezone as GMT, hence, all of
> my appointments are appearing 4 hours early (my TZ is EST5EDT but EST or
> "America/Indianapolis" or "America/Indiana/Indianapolis" all don't work
> either). I've set 'org-icalendar-timezone' and I see X-WR-TIMEZONE set
> correctly in the resulting .ics file.

All,

Following up to myself.

With a working example of X-WR-TIMEZONE from Richard Riley and a night's
sleep under my belt, I revisted setting 'org-icalendar-timezone' to my
time zone ("America/Indiana/Indianapolis") and this time it worked. Not
quite sure what happened yesterday but I suspect that my calendar was
being cached at Google and therefore did not reflect my furious cycle of
change/push/refresh as I tried different settings.

This thread:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Calendar/thread?tid=4655879e5ebc62f7&hl=en

laments the lack of timely refreshing of subscribed calendars and seems
to suggest that the refresh cycle may be as long as 24 hours. I can't
confirm that yet but I'm still waiting. It seems to be at least several
hours long.

Neal