Export Facebook and similar Events to your (Google) Calendar

Aim

  • Always have up-to-date Facebook events, which I’m attending to, in my calendar (I use Google Calendar)
  • Additionally sync to other calendar-related services, like Doodle
  • Use LAMP server to update (import-export) calendar
This is a draft. Research phase.

Existing solutions

Standard Facebook events export

  • webcal: URL is provided by Facebook for all upcoming events. URL is compatible with Google Calendar.
  • There were problems with events, which description did contain special (national) characters. Generated iCalendar data was invalid and unreadable by Google Calendar (all events weren’t available)
  • It is not possible to filter events in any way. All events, even declined ones, are listed.

Facebook Freedom

  • Possibility to select (filter) events by attending status. For example hide all declined and tentative
  • Permanent URL expires and must be recreated regularly
  • Uses third party server

To implement

Framework comparison for converter

bash

  • Input: curl
    • A framework (functions library) for parsing JSON Facebook Graph format is required (implement from scratch?)
  • Output: echo to text file
    • A framework (functions library) to support iCalendar format required (implement from scratch?)
    • There may be problems with text encoding (charset)

Java

Security

  • Calendar data must be only accessible for authorized (trusted) clients: me, Google Calendar
    • Data should be requested over an encrypted channel (HTTPS) to prevent “man in the middle” attack
    • It seems to be no way to hide URL from proxy in the middle, however the proxy must be normally trusted service.
  • Clarified:
    • Google Calendar supports custom CA certificates when reading calendar data over HTTPS. It is possible to add test iCalendar data from https URL on the test server.
  • When using a “secret” URL for the static file on Apache server, make sure, that automatic directory index generation (directory listing) is switched off (at least within a folder with the file). Otherwise it will be possible to browse all available files and find out the exact data URL. See configuration example below:
<Directory /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/dontlistme>
 Options -Indexes
</Directory>

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