How to Publish Google Calendar and Sub-Calendars to Your Website

Copyright 2006 Jack Knows Inc.

Google calendar is slick. I love this thing. I have overlayed 4 sub-calendars and now I can see them all in one place. The sub-calendars retain their individuality because they are color coded. If you want a super cheap, as in free, calendar for your business, church, or other group then this is a great solution. But, when Google calendar initially came out, there was no built-in way to publish your calendar to HTML. That was a real bummer. You usually create these types of calendars to share them with others.

Since that time, Google has made HTML versions of calendars available. That has been great. To get an HTML version of your calendar, go to "Manage Calendars" and then click on your calendar name, you will now find an HTML button to publish your calendar. Now, click on the "configuration tool" to get the HTML to copy to your webpage. The easiest solution to get this onto your web site is to make a link. Simply copy the HTML that Google provided and copy it into a link.

After you start playing around with Google calendar, you will notice its power. The first thing I did was add multiple sub-calendars. I love this feature because it allows me to see multiple calendars while retaining their individual identity. The events are all color-coded based on which calendar the event belongs to. Folks who are used to color coding event types may find this annoying and confusing. I like it. The next thing I noticed is that the HTML calendar doesn't pass sub-calendars to the calendar view. I really wanted to get that. After rooting around, this is how I fixed that. Cal Man, a Google employee, told me to insert multiple src lines in the iframe. Before I go on, you need to know that I am dropping the HTML brackets in these examples. That is a limitation in the way these articles get published. So, consult the Google configuration for the exact syntax. So, let say that your code has src="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=googlecalendarname&height=614" style=" border-width:0 " width="640" frameborder="0" height="614" What you need to do is get the html for the sub-calendar and place the src (after the embed?, not the first src!) next to your current calendar. The end result should look somewhat like this: src="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=googlecalendarname&src=anothergooglename&height=614" style=" border-width:0 " width="640" frameborder="0" height="614" There you have it. Now you can share your google calendar with the world! And, you can add as many sub-calendars as you want.

Just remember that you have made your calendar publicly available. If you don't want others to see it, you should not do it this way. People can find calendars by searching on Google calendar for publicly available calendars. Now, having said that, you can add other cool features to your calendar. Search for calendars that relate to your calendar topic area. You will be amazed at what is out there. For instance, let's say you have a Nascar site. You would love an easy way to display a Nascar Craftsman Truck schedule. Do a search on Nascar for public calendars. Voila, it's already been made publicly available. All you have to do is add it to your website. How nice is that?

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