Google Calendar Hates Baseball!

Okay, maybe not. But I did discover yesterday that Google Calendar has made adding a SF Giants game schedule to your calendar a lot more difficult than it used to be.

It used to be that when you wanted to add a public calendar to your own, you could browse through a "gallery" of calendars, searching by calendar title, to find the one you want. There would usually be a few SF Giants schedules available, complete with broadcast info. You'd pick one you like, click on a little doo-dad button thingy, and it would be added to your calendar. Easy-peasy.

So in anticipation of the start of the 2009 season, I opened up my calendar and clicked on the "Add" button, only to find that there was no more browsing capability. Turns out Google decided it was too hard to maintain the list (umm, isn't finding and pointing to information kinda what they do?), so they killed it off last month. It took a bit of searching through the Google Calendar support forums to figure this out. Funny thing - Google puts all sorts of crap up in the top corner of my calendar page to point out the useless stuff they add to the calendar, but they don't bother to tell you about the useful stuff they take away.

At any rate, to add a public calendar now, you need to know the URL. How the hell am I supposed to know the frakkin' URL of a public calendar that somebody makes? Fortunately, the SF Giants schedule page offers help to add the schedule to your Google Calendar. Unfortunately, the URL they give you is incomplete and useless (at least using Firefox on Mac - YMMV).

Not one to give up easily, I perused the page source and found the correct URL, and finally added the schedule to my calendar.

For those of you who want to try this at home, ignore whatever the SF Giants schedule page tells you to do. Here's the right URL: http://mlb.mlb.com/soa/ical/schedule.ics?team_id=137&season=2009

Now go ahead and add in the schedule, so that you never miss a game!