At the Hadrian Hotel

At the Hadrian Hotel

Monday, September 11, 2006

Weather on Your Calendar

My office-mate just turned me on to something that I find has been available at least since June 2006 (from what I've seen in a few blog posts).

If you've ever wanted to know what the weather was going to be like when you were scheduling an event, it's actually very easy. Just go to the Weather Underground page and enter your ZIP code, Airport code, or some other such identifying information in the search box in the upper-left corner of the page and hit ENTER. On the right side of the page, across from the locality name, is a button labelled "ICS." Copy the link location for that button, and use it as the URL for a remote calendar.

If you are using iCal, go to Calendar->Subscribe... in the menu bar and paste in the URL in the dialog box that pops up. If you are using Google Calendar, go to "Manage Calendars" and select "Add calendar" in the Other Calendars section. Select "Public Calendar Address," paste the URL into the box, and click on "Add."

As an example, here is the URL I got from the Weather Underground for Pennington, NJ:

http://ical.wunderground.com/auto/ical/NJ/Pennington.ics?units=both

This worked just fine for me in iCal but, unfortunately, when I tried it in Google Calendar, Google was unable to import the calendar info. Sigh.... Of course, YMMV!


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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Well, it looks like you no longer need to do this with Google Calendar...

Google now offers a weather feature on their calendar. All you need to do is set your preferred location in the Google Calendar settings, and decide whether you want temperatures shown in degrees C or degrees F.

What you get are small postage stamp images showing the weather conditions for the next few days. If you hover over an image, you get a pop-up witha text version of the forcast as well as predicted high and low temperatures.