My work colleague Simon was looking for a way to add all of the upcoming UK strike action to their calendar, presumably so they know when not to try to catch a bus or require an ambulance or maybe just so they’d know to whom they should be giving support on any particular day. Thom was able to suggest a few places to see lists of strikes, such as this BBC News page and the comprehensive strikecalendar.co.uk, but neither provided a handy machine-readable feed.
If only they knew somebody who loves an excuse to throw a screen-scraper together. Oh wait, that’s me!
I threw together a 36-line Ruby program that extracts all the data from strikecalendar.co.uk and outputs an
.ics file. I guess if you wanted you could set it up to automatically update the file a couple of times a day and host it at a URL that people can subscribe to; that’s an exercise left for the reader.
If you just want a one-off import based on the state-of-play right now, though, you can save this .ics file to your computer and import it to your calendar. Simple.