New Feature: Dopplr Subscribes to Your Personal Calendar
We’re happy to announce that we’ve just added a feature that is among the most requested by all of you: subscribing to your online calendar and adding trips from it into Dopplr automatically.
Today we’ll explain how to use Google Calendar with Dopplr - although this feature works with any calendar that can publish an iCalendar feed to the web. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to do it.
First, create a new calendar. We suggest calling “My Travel” or some such thing, but of course that is up to you. When you create it, do not make it a public calendar unless you want the whole world to be able to find it via Google search.
Now, in your new Google Calendar, create an event as we show below. Set the dates in the “When” fields. Be sure to put the location in the “Where” field (that’s the most reliable way to tell Dopplr what your destination is, although we’ll also scan the title and description for place names if we don’t see a location).
IMPORTANT: To help ensure that Dopplr understands your actual destination in the Where field, please make sure the city name goes first, not after a street address. For example, “San Francisco, 21 Streetname” will work, whereas “21 Streetname, San Francisco” will unfortunately confuse Dopplr. Also, if you’re using a common city name — such as Cambridge — you’ll get better results by giving more information, e.g. “Cambridge, MA” (Massachusetts in the United States) or “Cambridge, United Kingdom”. Dopplr is smart but can’t read your mind; we’re working on ways to make this process easier for you.
Once you’ve finished entering your information about the trip, click the Save button.
Below, you’ll see the event in your calendar.
Now, under “My Calendars” (below left), click the down-arrow link next to “My travel” (or whatever you called your travel calendar). You’ll see this:
Click “Calendar Settings” and look at the “Calendar Details” tab in this screen:
At the bottom of that screen…
… click the ICAL button next to Private Address: — this is very important if you want to keep your travel plans private to yourself and your trusted Dopplr travellers — and you’ll get a pop-up that looks something like this:
Copy that URL into your clipboard. Now go to your Dopplr page and click on “Your account” (at the top of your page). Then click “Import trips from external calendars” and you’ll see this:
Paste in the URL you copied from your new Google calendar. Dopplr will look at that calendar, and let you know if it’s found some trips. In this case it found the Amsterdam trip created in our example. Click “Subscribe to calendar”.
And automagically it’ll appear on your Dopplr calendar. That’s it. Now when you update your Google calendar, Dopplr will discover the changes and reflect them on your Dopplr page. There will be a note of it in your journal and in your email alerts.
Note: If you change something in Dopplr you’ll break the link between the external calendar event — but not the entire calendar, whew — and Dopplr. (Trips you create in Dopplr won’t affect the Google calendar, however, or break the connection.) If that’s a concern, you may want to do all of your updating of trips from the Google Calendar.
Coming soon: Apple iCal to Dopplr.
With which privacy settings will they appear in dopplr? Will content in my entry appear in dopplr as well so that i would need two entries for that, one for real and one for display in dopplr?
Nicole,
Any content from your calendar entry will appear as a private note, visible only to your on your trip page and not shared with anyone else.
Matt.
Is there any way to export my Dopplr trips to Google Calendar?
I mean absolutely different action than in the article, when I’m adding a trip in Dopplr and it automatically appear in Google Calendar.
Andrey,
Yes, there is. There’s a blog post about doing exactly that with iCal, Google Calendar and several other systems here:
http://blog.dopplr.com/index.php/2007/08/22/write-your-trips-once-read-in-several-places/
Great thanks Matt, I haven’t noticed it.
Will dopplr pick up on just addresses that are different from my home address?
I’d like to just add trips to my main calendar and let dopplr pick up that I’m going somewhere because it has a different address.
Matt K,
WIth this release you need a separate calendar, otherwise Dopplr will try and interpret any event as a trip. We’ll be adding ways soon to differentiate between trips and non-trips in the same calendar.
I’ve tried this and it looks like it dopplr is finding random locations for any event, travel related or not.
I have a recurring event called “What did you read this month?” and dopplr thinks I’m going to thoen thailand.
I created a separate calendar for Travel, created two events, and then let Dopplr import them.
The dates moved over fine, but the locations were way off. Both events were for San Francisco (the exact text I used was ‘Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA’ and ‘Moscone West, San Francisco, CA’ but the first was interpreted as some place in Framingham, MA and the other some village in India.
I’m sure this will get fixed, but otherwise, great feature! Now that this is in place, I’ll definitely be using this service more often!
Matt B, thanks for the quick response
I’ll be taking advantage of this feature as soon as I don’t have to split off a separate calendar. It’ll be great to not have to enter my trips in only one place at a time.
Rik,
Sorry about that! Because Dopplr is city-oriented, it’s trying to look for cities called “Moscone Center” and “Moscone West” and getting confused. “San Francisco, CA” by itself should work just fine.
Hi, I’m guessing this feature is a little bit in development at the moment… If so can I make a suggestion or two.
Calendar events (with clear, city-based locations) from Google Calendar are not importing very consistently for me. Perhaps other are experiencing similar problems?
For example I have three very clearly defined (and located) events in a Google calendar:
1. Jan 19-Feb 3: Accra, Ghana
2. Feb 4-March 27: London, United Kingdom
3. March 28-June 27: Nong Khai, Thailand.
4. And my home city is Thailand.
Dopplr interpreted this into:
A. “You are already taking a trip to Accra, Ghana”. But actually (even though it’s this trip is in the past, i.e. the parser appears to have misinterpreted items 1 and 2. Perhaps “already taking”, although in the present tense, isn’t meant in the sense of “currently”, but instead means “you have already got a past record of this trip in our database, so we did not overwrite it”. In which case, I recommend some rewording - maybe to something like “We already have your trip to XX on record, so ignored it”.
B. “You are [also] at home in Nong Khai” (which conflicts with item 2 and the face-value interpretation of point A). I have no idea why my London trip is being ignored. I have tried various wordings of London, plus a postcode. All yield the same result. Does the parser have a problem with current events?
C. “You are taking a trip to Nong Khai” (correct. Or, more accurately, I am returning home to Nong Khai. Should a trip to home be reworded?)
Finally, when I hit “refresh” in the Subscribe tool, the timestamp of “last fetched” does not change.
Cheers
Luke
Luke, thanks for the very detailed note. MattB and team are going to look closely at this.
Interesting and useful feature (I no longer have to maintain data on Dopplr, I can just do it in Google Calendar now) but the behaviour mentioned in comment #7 is pretty important if this is to get real world use.
I’d be nice if Dopplr was taught how to subscribe to HTTP-password-protected iCal URLs such as http://icalx.com/private/XXX/
Lars,
Thanks, good suggestion. We’ll work on it.
Hi,
unfortunately the feature doesn’t work for me. When I hit the “Subscribe” button, Dopplr successfully parses my Google iCal feed and displays a correct list of trips under “In that calendar, we found the following trips:”. But when I click on “subscribe to calendar” below that list, he simply reloads that list (in ajax-style), but I don’t get any “successfully subscribed” feedback nor do any trips show up in my dopplr trip list. Any idea? Is this a bug?
Alex
The feature doesn’t seem to work for me — neither the TripIt .ics nor the Google calendar .ics imports; the status bar just spins and spins. ?
Alexander,
Can I ask which web browser you’re using? I’ve seen a similar issue with the Firefox 3 betas, but not with any other browser I’ve tried.
Yes, I was using Firefox 3.0 beta 4. Silly me to not include the browser version in the bug report when using a beta browser ;-)
I tried it with Safari and it worked! All trips from my Google calendar were correctly extracted … cool feature! Now I only need to convince our HR to subscribe to my Dopplr Feed for booking an apartment or hotel for my trips ;-)
BTW: do you plan to add a confirmation mail parser like TripIt has it?
Hey Guys,
Are you guys far from figuring out how to import directly from Mac ical into Dopplr. That would be the best feature yet!
I second that request for secured ical.com calendar files. Or at least this “coming soon: Apple iCal to Dopplr” feature :)
hi, I want all the past travels to be pulled from my travel gcal… is dat kind of importing possible?
yup. I just ran into the Firefox 3 beta4 bug as well. “Subscribe to external calendars” doesn’t work in FF3, but works fine in Safari.
Primarily I’m trying to use this to import events from upcoming.org. However, this is fairing very badly (zero success rate so far) because the location fields do not follow your requirements - generally they are full street addresses.
Is there a chance this is going to be made more intelligent in the future, or is there an alternative way to import upcoming.org events?
Mark,
We’re working on explicit Upcoming support using their API. Their iCal feeds don’t break down the information into fields that are granular enough to extract the city reliably. Watch this space.
Coming soon: Apple iCal to Dopplr…
How often do you grab the webcal feed? I keep hitting refresh, but it is not getting my latest events. It’s been a couple of days since I added some events. I have 7 in the webcal feed, but it’s only grabbing 5.
I have subscribed to my google calendar and it imported the events correctly. However, I have changed one of my events’ locations and the change is not showing up. I have hit the “refresh” link on the import external calendars page and it appears to be working. When it’s done processing, though, it still says “last updated: 10 hours ago” and the events don’t change at all. Am I doing something wrong or just being impatient and it will work on it’s own with a little more time?
Thanks.