[Cue sideaways glance] Or so I thought…

In a flurry of activity earlier today, the Reverend posted this:

while I was admiring the new link to UMW Blogs on the UMW homepage, I clicked on the Events link, and to my surprise it was a Google calendar. Wow! Who knew? When looking at the source code, I released it was actually an aggregation of 10 different Google Calendars–all the more fascinating.

Jim went on: “I did a search for the term “UMW” through Google’s public calendars and found over 40″ and the describes subscribing to the calendars, looking at them in the single aggregated view within Google Calendar itself, before hitting a problem: “Google won’t given me an embed code for the aggregation of all of the public calendars I subscribed to around UMW”

Err… rewind one moment… “When looking at the source code, I released it was actually an aggregation of 10 different Google Calendars“…?

This is what Jim saw but didn’t see:

Got it yet?

Take these two calendars, discovered by searching the Public Calendars in Google Calendar:
- Snooker Championships Listing (some events are listed over the next four months or so).
- Formula One Grand Prix listings for 2009 (the events start during March, 2009).

Now look through to March on this calendar: aggregated calendar view. It shows events from both calendars in the same view.

So what we have here is an aggregated calendar view that can be used to display several (that is, multiple) Google calendar feeds in a single view. To embed the calendar in your own page, just stick it in an iframe.

For each extra calendar feed, just add &src=CALENDAR_ID to the URL. The CALENDAR_ID will probably be of the form:
jabqnchvht5r2pjv0haqlg1j8s%40group.calendar.google.com

PS I did wonder whether I could add the aggregated calendar view as a single calendar to my Google Calendar. It seems not:

That is, it looks like each calendar feed will be added separately, rather than as a single, combined calendar.

But while that would have been a “nice to have”, the ability to display events from multiple Google calendars in a single calendar view in such a straightforward way is probably a big enough win anyway:-)

PPS aren’t comments wonderful (thanks Steve:-) – it seems thaqt you can generate the combined embed code within Google Calendar… Subscribe to the calenders you want to display, then go to the calendar settings:

Select the “Customise the color, size and other options” in the “Embed the Calendar” area:

And then select the calendars you want to include:

Simple:-)