Write (Your Trips) Once, Read in Several Places
One of the most urgent requests we’ve had is about data-entry: We don’t want to have to enter our trip information more than once on our computers.
We’re working on making this a smooth, even seamless process across several popular calendars — and it’s dead easy on one (Mac iCal) right now, as you’ll see below, and relatively easy on Microsoft Outlook if you use Windows (and you can use basically the same technique for Evolution on Linux). We’ll also show you a somewhat more cumbersome way to connect to Google Calendar. Details:
Exporting to Apple iCal Calendar
It genuinely could not be more simple to make your Dopplr trips show up in iCal (the calendar format that Apple uses). At the bottom of Your Trips (on your personal Dopplr page), click on the link that says, “Subscribe to your trips in iCal” — see the picture below.
You’ll get a dialog box like this (I’ve obfuscated the exact URL). Be sure to copy this URL into your clipboard:
Click “Subscribe” and you’ll get another dialog box asking you to name your calendar. Give it a name and it’ll show up in your Mac iCal list as a new calendar, as below. Easy, eh?
Exporting to Microsoft Outlook
This technique also works with Microsoft Outlook on Windows, or at least the current (Office 2007) version. Click on the “Subscribe to your trips in iCal” link on your home page (as above). If you’re running Firefox (you should, you know), you’ll get this query:
Go ahead and launch. You’ll then see this dialog (if you’re running Internet Explorer (you really shouldn’t) you’ll go straight there):
Click on Advanced and rename the calendar’s folder name to something easy. I chose “Dan Dopplr” for this demonstration. Click OK, and you’ll be back at the above “Add this Internet Calendar to Outlook…” box. Click Yes, and you’ll see a page that looks like this (if you’re in the Month view):
You can combine the calendars by clicking the left-arrow on the top-left of the Dopplr calendar next to the name you’ve given it.
Exporting to Evolution (Linux)
Do pretty much the same thing as with Windows. There’s one different dialog box, asking you how often you want to update the calendar, but it works fine.
Exporting to Google Calendar
Google Calendar users can see their Dopplr calendars, too. This takes a little more effort, but it’s not difficult. Here’s how:
Log into your Google Calendar and, over on the left side under My Calendars, click Add and then Add by URL:
Now cut and paste the URL from your clipboard into the text box as below:
DO NOT allow others to find this public calendar via Google Calendar search unless you want the world to know about your travels. When you save this configuration you’ll see the new calendar under “Other Calendars” in your My Calendars list.
Agan, we’d suggest renaming it, but that’s your choice.
Note: There’s no obvious way to make this work with Yahoo Calendar. If you know a way, we’d like to hear about it.
It’d be awesome if I could also subscribe to a calendar for the trips of everyone I’m following. It helps give me a reminder to say “have a good time” and “welcome back, how was it?”
It would be indeed, Greg. At the moment the best we can offer is an RSS feed (check the bottom of your “fellow travellers” list).
But stay tuned…
That’s very nice, but unfortunately it’s the opposite of what I’d personally like. I maintain my trip in iCal, and I’d prefer them to be pushed out to Dopplr.
I set up a hack that can publish tagged events in iCal out to an hCalendar file (could be anything really), and it would be nice if I could get Dopplr to read in some external file and use that.
I’d much rather edit/control my travel information in iCal as it syncs with my mobile phone, which is where I generally enter travel information and handles meeting requests from colleagues.
I’m afraid I have to agree with Steve. I use Google Calendar, and it contains lots of information I wouldn’t necessarily want pulled into Dopplr. If Dopplr could extract the location information only, and use that as the basis of my travel plans, it’d be really useful to me. But at the moment, I just simply don’t have the inclination to keep Dopplr up-to-date.
Steve and Andrew,
We’re definitely looking into ways to make this happen. One of the issues, as you imply, is knowing precisely what to extract. Are you willing to put information into your calendar in a specific way that Dopplr can parse?
As for syncing with a mobile phone, I have no trouble getting my information to sync by including the Dopplr calendar in the sync process.
Dan,
Yes, going from Dopplr to iCal or Google is nice, but not really useful. I need to go from the calendar I am working in (iCal or Google) TO Dopplr. Let’s be real; these are real calanders with all the functionality for scheduling built in. We don’t need another one.
I would be happy to even work in a special designated layer (or calender) for my trips, if Dopplr could parse it. Second best would be to add some tag to an trip entry that would transfer it to Dopplr.
Pushing to Dopplr would be great.
I currently use Spanning Sync to push my iCal to a Google calendar, which basically does the same thing, allowing me to put an event into iCal and have it propagate. I doubt that’s directly helpful to anyone, other than wanting to say it’s just as great as people expect it would be.
I guess the quicker hack I could see for this is being able to email add an event to Dopplr. If i cntl click ‘Mail Event’ on a trip and send it to a Dopplr address linked to my account, you’d get an .ics file, very structured data. I have no idea how hard that is to implement, but I think it would be a ghetto fabulous short term solution.
Kevin, Quinn et al — we hear you!
Yes, I would also like to have my iCal data pulled from Dopplr, and I would like to add: If I know, Dopplr uses my data, I would enter some “good” input value for the iCal Location field, that should help, but one other thing: sometimes my calendar has not only one location a day, so I am sure how to represent this in Dopplr, until now it seems not possible. And also: to give a tag which events should be used from Dopplr seems to me a good solution. Just my two cents.
Helpful suggestions, Matthias…thanks.
I’d love to create a badge for my site with an RSS feed of my trips, is something like that possible?
Chris, should be no problem to download one of the RSS icons and link to it. Here’s a site with lots of icons.
Not to design the solution for you, but concerning the Google calendar and to reiterate Kevin’s point from 22-Aug
> Are you willing to put information into your calendar in a specific way that Dopplr can parse?
Yeah, I can create a calender and call it “Dopplr”.
Then there are two options:
1. I share the calendar with the world (which I do, I don’t really care who knows where I am, but I am an optimist about these things)
2. Dopplr has a dedicated Google account (or similar) that I specifically share the calendar with.
The issue with #2 might be performance, but I have no idea if there is an API mechanism to work around the fact the the Dopplr user at Google has thousands of calendars that they parse through.
This approach allows me to create all the information in Google and display it back to Dopplr. All I have to do is remember in which calendar to create the entry.
Hi all,
what about Lotus Notes? Is this supported?
Wolfgang
No, “Dopplr” should not process my ‘master’ Calendar, regardless of
- where I keep it (Windows, Linux, Symbian, MacOS, Web-hosted)
or
- which application I use (Outlook, Notes, Thunderbird, …)
but nearly all of these are able to publish selected entries to external
calendars, either in a simple way or with a little scripting. Selections
can be made based on e.g. tag, category or subject substring depending
on what the ‘master’ application supports.
So if Dopplr provides an interface (with a propper authentication mechanism)
for push using a common standard calendar entry exchange format (and
provides a share point for application specific solutions) we might get that
done quickly.
-erwin
Dopplr could learn a thing or two from tripit - http://www.tripit.com - they can parse many of the travel companies’ e-mail confirmations and turn them into calendar entries. I hate having to type all of the critical travle info (flight numbers, confirmation codes, etc) into my calendar and tripit takes that pain away. Of course they don’t come close to dopplr when it comes to the social networking side of things.
[...] some time, Dopplr has been able to export trips to calendars; TripIt can also adds trips to a calendar, but does so in a much more precise fashion, actually [...]