Last April, we demoed some of the structured blogging capabilities of BlogMatrix. Part of the demo involved posting an event and having it show up in Google Calendar. We've recently decided to make that code part of the standard "base" installation under a system called continuous export -- whenever you post something, it will show up on other systems as appropiate.

Anyway, I couldn't get it to work so I contacted the Google Calendar Data API support group where a gentleman named Ryan Boyd helped me out. I didn't quite believe his last answer so I decided make a standalone test case that could be safely shared. Of course, after I finished writing it the test case worked perfectly so I ported back that test case code and everything's working just fine.

As a public service, I've included the test case code here. If you're trying to do PUT/POST using Python's urllib2, need to login to Google Calendar, or whatever, this code is well documented internally, is easy to follow, and it works.

This will demo quite nicely -- you can go to upcoming or any other hCalendar supporting tool, import the event and have it published on your Google Calendar. Neat and useful.

Outstanding items:

• making sure when an item is deleted in BlogMatrix, it's deleted on Google Calendar
• implementing Google Account Authentication
• make Google Calendar update (in the user's browser) when the item is added. Currently, one has to press the browser's refresh button which is suboptimal