For the people who run events

Get your events on CalDiscovery

CalDiscovery lists events by reading the calendar you already publish. There is no form to fill in for each event, no account, and nothing to pay. If your website has a public calendar feed, this site can follow it and every event you add shows up here, with a link back to you.

This page explains what "a public calendar feed" means, how to get one from the tools most website providers already use, and how to tell me about it.

Why it is set up this way

Most event sites ask you to enter each event by hand, or they only show the ticketed shows that pay to be there. CalDiscovery does neither. It goes out and reads the calendars that local places publish themselves, in the same format your phone's calendar app uses, and brings them together by city and by type.

That has three consequences worth knowing:

You have ownership. Your calendar is the source. Change a time, cancel a show, add a series, and the listing here follows within a day or so. Nothing is copied and left to go stale.
Every listing links back to you. Visitors land on your page for details on your event.
I need a feed, not a web page. A calendar drawn on a web page is for people to read. A calendar feed is the same events in a form a program can read: one address that always returns the current list. Nearly every calendar tool produces one. Below is how this site can find yours!

What this site can read

Public iCalendar feeds. A web address that returns your events in the .ics format. It is the standard behind Apple Calendar, Google Calendar and Outlook. It usually ends in .ics or has ical in it, and it must be reachable without signing in.

What makes a feed useful once it is found:

A venue address in each event's location field. That is how events land on the city map. "Main Hall" alone cannot be placed. "Main Hall, 123 Pine St, Portland, OR" for example can.
Future events on it. A feed that only exports the current month, or only past events, gives me little to show. Most tools have a setting or a URL option for "all upcoming".
One event per entry with a start time. A single all-day entry called "See website for schedule" is something visitors will need to dig for.
A stable address. If the feed's URL changes, the listing goes quiet until I find the new one.

Where to find your feed

Depends on the tool you use. Here are links to the provider's own help pages.

Google Calendar

Make the calendar public, then copy its iCal address. In Calendar settings on a computer, open your calendar under "Settings for my calendars", tick "Make available to public", then under "Integrate calendar" copy the Public address in iCal format. It ends in /public/basic.ics.

Help: Create and manage a public Google calendar

Please do not send the "Secret address". It contains a key that lets anyone read the whole calendar, including entries you never meant to share. If one reaches me I do not store it; I look for the public address of the same calendar instead, and if there is none the calendar is not listed.

Outlook.com and Outlook on the web

Calendar settings, then "Publish a calendar". Choose the calendar and the level of detail, click Publish, and copy the ICS link (not the HTML one).

Help: Share your calendar in Outlook.com

Apple iCloud Calendar

On iCloud.com, open the calendar's sharing options and turn on Public Calendar, then copy the link. It begins with webcal://; send it as is, I can read that.

Help: Share a calendar on iCloud.com

WordPress with The Events Calendar

Your events page already serves a feed. Add ?ical=1 to its address, for example https://yoursite.org/events/?ical=1. By default it covers the current view. The plugin's subscribe menu on the events page offers the same feed. If you can, set the feed to include all upcoming events rather than one month.

Help: Subscribing to and exporting events

Squarespace events pages

Squarespace's help only documents per-event export buttons, but an events page set to List view serves a whole-calendar feed at its own address plus ?format=ical, for example https://yoursite.com/events?format=ical. Set the page to List, not Calendar, or the feed stops at the current month.

Help: Squarespace calendar pages

Localist (many universities and cities!)

Every Localist calendar and every filtered view has an ICS feed under the subscribe options on the page. Copy the one for "all events" or for the department or venue you run.

Help: Localist ICS feeds

Trumba

A published Trumba calendar has a feed at webcal://www.trumba.com/calendars/<webname>.ics, where <webname> is the calendar's web name. Password-protected calendars cannot be read.

Help: Trumba: subscribe from iCal

Teamup

Open the calendar in a browser, go to Preferences, then iCalendar Feeds. The last URL in the list is the feed for all sub-calendars.

Help: Where to find a Teamup iCalendar feed URL

Tockify

Tockify calendars support iCalendar subscription. The feed address is in the calendar's sharing or subscribe options.

Help: Tockify documentation

Meetup groups

On the group's page, open the Events tab, switch to the Calendar view, and the export options appear under the calendar. Choose the feed of all the group's events, not your RSVPs.

Help: Exporting an event to your calendar

Tools that do not give me a feed

Wix Events has no public calendar feed. If your site is on Wix, embed a calendar that does (Tockify and Google Calendar both have Wix install guides) and send me that feed.
Eventbrite organizer pages have no public feed either. Keep a calendar of your own alongside it and put the Eventbrite link in each event's description; readers get the ticket link and I get the feed.
A Facebook events page, an Instagram grid, a PDF, or a calendar drawn as an image cannot be read.

Check it first

Paste the feed address into Google Calendar ("Other calendars", then "From URL") or Apple Calendar ("File", then "New Calendar Subscription"). If your events appear there with the right dates and venues, they will appear here too. If they do not, the problem is in the feed, and nothing I do on this side can fix it.

Let me know!

Send the feed address. Say which city the events belong to if it is not obvious from the address. I check new feeds by hand before they go live, so allow some days. Once listed, you do not need to tell me about individual events, you can simply add them to your hosted calendar feed!

Send it to hello@caldiscovery.com.

A few things I find I do not list and / or filter out: events behind a login, calendars that are mostly past events, and feeds that turn out to be one entry pointing at a website. Everything else that is local and public is welcome. From a record store's in-store shows to a library's storytime, this is a great place to find them.