Help With Icalendar

Ways to subscribe to talks

This page explains how to subscribe to a talks listing using an electronic calendar. You can also subscribe to talks information by email or by RSS .

KNOWN ISSUE on some systems: timezone problems – please see bottom of this page.

Subscribe using an electronic calendar

If you use Apple iCal, Google Calendar, Mozilla Sunbird and Ximian Evolution, or have the Microsoft Outlook with the Remote Calendars plug-in installed, then you can have talks in your list automatically listed in your calendar. Please note that there is a known “calendar cache” bug in certain versions of Apple iCal which mean that sometimes it has trouble receiving updates to talks – this affects iCalendar feeds from other websites, not just talks.cam.

To subscribe to a talks listing using your electronic calendar, click on the ‘Subscribe using ical/vcal’ link on a list page. This subscription will tell your electronic calendar to automatically add and update talks in your calendar as they appear on the talks.cam website (Apple iCal users please see note above). You can also download an individual talk as an event for your calendar by clicking ‘Download to your calendar using vCal’ on a talk page – although if this talk is updated on the website afterwards, you won’t be notified, and your event won’t update unless you download it again.

Google calendar users: If the subscribe link takes you to a different default calendar on your computer, you will need to select the URL and copy it. Then go to Google calendar, and follow the menu “Other Calendars → Add by URL ” to paste the address.

Note that, depending on how your computer is configured, clicking the subscribe link may result in an error. In which case, try copying and pasting the link in manually, replacing the webcal: bit at the start with http:

Technical Info

The iCalendar feed is intended to meet RFC 2445 , however, there is a known issue with our current implementation:

Known timezone issue: We are aware that during British Summer Time, iCalendar feeds from Talks.cam may not display correctly on some systems e.g. event times may display as an hour late. We hope to fix this issue in the medium-term, but as Talks.cam has no project-specific funding, we cannot promise when this will be. In the meantime, please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.

Also see: Technical specification of all talks.cam feeds.