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Two ways to get events into your calendar

Both start from the same feed. The difference is whether it keeps itself up to date after you add it.

Subscribe, and it stays current

Recommended

Your calendar app holds on to the link and re-checks it on its own schedule. New events appear, cancelled ones disappear, times that move get corrected. You do nothing after the first click.

What to expect

  • Your app decides how often to refresh. Google is typically slow to pick up changes, often several hours to a day. Apple Calendar, Thunderbird and Nextcloud let you set the interval yourself, and Fastmail refreshes on its own schedule.
  • The events land in their own calendar that you can hide with one checkbox when you want your own schedule back.
  • You cannot edit individual events. They belong to the feed, so anything you change is overwritten on the next refresh.
  • A busy city can add a lot of entries. Subscribing to one tag rather than "all events" is usually the happier choice.

Use the Subscribe, Google or Outlook button on any city page. They differ because calendar apps do not agree on how to hand over a feed URL.

Download the file, and it stays put

The Download once button hands you a one-time snapshot. Importing it copies those events into your calendar as ordinary entries.

What to expect

  • It never updates. What you imported is what you have, including anything that later gets cancelled or rescheduled.
  • The events become yours: you can edit them, delete the ones you do not care about, move them around.
  • Importing the file again later usually creates duplicates rather than updating in place.

Worth it when you want a fixed list you can prune by hand, for one month or one festival. For anything ongoing, subscribe.

Note: if you trim a calendar in the editor, downloading is the only way to take it with you. A subscription link is the same for everyone who has it, so it can't carry your trimming.

Adding a feed by hand

Copy feed link gives you the feed's address. Every calendar app can take one, including the four here with no button of their own. Paste it wherever your app asks to add a calendar by URL.

Each app has their own way to add entries.

Choosing what lands in it

Every city is split by tag, and each tag is its own feed, so the simplest filter is to subscribe only to the ones you want. Markets and music, and nothing else.

Filtering more finely than that, muting one source site while keeping the rest of a tag, is not something a plain feed URL can do: the link is the same for everybody who has it. That is the piece still being worked out, and it is the one part of this that would need accounts.

How accurate is this?

Every event here comes from a calendar published by a venue, an organizer or a local listing site. I collect and sort them, I don't write them. That means a time can change after I've read it, an occasional event lands in the wrong city and some listings are thinner than others. Always check with the venue before making plans.

Filtering out events that don't belong to your city is ongoing work, and it's improving steadily. If you spot something wrong, tell me and it gets looked at.

What I do not do