By Steve Smail, USN Website Manager
Calendar feeds are incredibly useful because they allow individuals to “feed” calendars from enabled website calendars into their own personal calendar/organization system of choice. When the organization’s calendar events change, those changes dynamically and automatically flow into your system, too. Calendar feeds are sometimes called subscriptions, and they are essentially custom URLs you load into your own calendaring system, and are different than calendar “exports.” Exports should typically be avoided when a feed is also available, because exports are static event data files that you export out of a system first and then import into your calendar - they don’t automatically get updated if the organization changes the event. In general, you almost always want to use the automatically updated RSS calendar feeds whenever possible/available, and avoid the data export/import options.
For USN, and really any organization out there that has calendar feeds available online, the organization provides the feeds (the custom URLs) and then users/individuals take responsibility for adding and using the URLS and understanding how their calendar system of choice handles these feeds/subscriptions. The two big calendar systems familiar to most folks would be Google and Apple, but at this point most any calendaring system found in Outlook, Yahoo, etc. typically will support calendar feeds.
Before getting into the specifics of how it works, we want to be clear: individuals take responsibility for understanding their own personal calendar system and account preferences for utilizing calendar feeds, because once USN’s system provides the feed URLs, the rest is up to you and your system.
To access our USN website calendar feeds, follow these steps, preferably on your laptop/computer and not on a mobile device, especially for first-time users:
- Log in to www.usn.org
- Visit the Calendar tab
- Click on the Calendar Feed icon in the upper right corner
- In the pop-up window, look for the category of calendars (for example, your calendars, your child’s calendar, or school calendars), and then right click or Ctrl-click to copy the link to the calendar feed. Note that you can do “entire” categories of combined calendars, or twirl down the icon next to individual calendar feeds to grab something a specific feed from an individual calendar.
- Once you’ve copied the feed URL, open your calendar software of choice and add the feed:
- For Google Calendars (on a computer), add a calendar and choose the “From URL” option, then paste the custom URL (USNs start with webcal://usn.myschoolapp.com…) and save.
- For Apple Calendar (on a computer), click on the File menu and choose “New Calendar Subscription”, paste the URL and save. - Give a few seconds/minutes for the calendar feed to initially populate its events into your own calendar system, and then you can customize this new calendar in your own system with colors, alerts, other settings.
Again, calendar feeds are great because when the organization updates an event, the changes automatically flow into your calendar system. However, be aware that the timing/delay of the automatic update can vary from a few seconds to a few hours or even a day to go from the original calendar to your feed calendar. Some systems have options that allow you to refresh the feed on your schedule, rather than wait for the random update interval that USN and you don’t control - that’s up to the systems working in the background.