The first of the new CA features to be rolled out: a Canadian Atheist calendar.
The Canadian Atheist calendar is an iCalendar data file that you can use with pretty much every calendar application. (Theoretically. I’ve only tested it with Lightning and Google Calendar.)
The URL is https://www.canadianatheist.com/calendar.ics, but if you just try to click it, depending on your browser configuration it might try to open a calendar application or download it. You’ll probably want to open it in a calendar application. (Note that you may have to specify that it is a read-only calendar – you can’t add or change events.) You can subscribe to it (you won’t need to set the update frequency to more than once a week) and it will automatically be updated as new events get added.
Right now the calendar only has a handful of special days (World Humanist Day, HumanLight, Blasphemy Day, etc.) and a couple of events (the upcoming Supreme Court hearing of the TWU case). These were just added as proof-of-concept test cases. The intention is to add more events and dates of interest, including things like conferences and so on.
A couple of technical notes if you want to try it:
- The calendar is very experimental. I wrote all the software to generate it from scratch, so it’s pretty much inevitable that there are going to be a few bugs at first.
- The calendar location is definitely going to change at some point, if only because of our eventual move to HTTPS. When that happens I might try to put a redirect in so it keeps working. On the other hand, I might break the calendar into parts instead: one for special dates (“atheist holidays”, if you will) and one for events (conferences and stuff). If anything changes, I’ll make a post about it.
Go ahead and give it a try. If you see any problems, let me know via a comment or the contact form.
If you have any suggestions for other dates or events to add to the calendar, you can leave a comment or use the contact form any time. (In the future there will even be an automated way to add events or special dates… but let’s work with what we’ve got for now.)