Information Management Weblog

Birthday tracker

I'm not so great a remembering things like birthdates, so I whipped up a little script to generate an iCalendar file that can be read into my Google Calendar (or any other calendering app that lets you "subscribe" to a calendar).

I tried to keep this as bare-bones as possible. It is a ruby script, and it should work just fine on any shared host.

The script:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# Created by Karl Nelson, 1/16/2008

# This cgi script reads a YAML file (events.yml) and produces an iCalendar-formatted file

# that can be read by calendaring programs (iCal, Google Calendar, etc).

# The purpose is to display events that repeat annually, like birthdays, anniversaries, and such.

# I'm using this to track the important dates in my family.


require 'yaml'

$LOAD_PATH << './icalendar-1.0.2/lib'

require 'icalendar'

require 'date'

require 'cgi'

# Load data and various "constants"

cgi = CGI.new

events = YAML::load( File.open( 'events.yml'))

if cgi.include?('families')

  families = cgi['families'].split(',')

else

  families = ['smith']

end

years = [Date.today.year - 1, Date.today.year, Date.today.year + 1]

cal = Icalendar::Calendar.new

# Loop through the data, producing the events

years.each do | year |

  families.each do | family |

    events[family].each do | event |

      actual_date = Date.parse(event['date'])

      date = Date.new(year,actual_date.month,actual_date.mday)

      if actual_date < date

        ical_event = Icalendar::Event.new

        ical_event.dtstart date, {"VALUE" => ["DATE"]}

        ical_event.summary = event['event']

        ical_event.description = "#{actual_date.strftime('%m/%d/%Y')}, #{(date.year - actual_date.year)} years ago"

        cal.add_event(ical_event)

      end

    end

  end

end

# Send the data out...

cgi.out("text/plain") { cal.to_ical }

Because I have more than one "family" I'd like to track, and I'd like to let my relatives use this for their purposes, I've built in a way to specify (via a query string variable) which family it displays. Then, in the YAML file, just list the events like this:

smith:
    -
        event: "Uncle Earl's birthday"
        date: 1/10/1950
    -
        event: "Aunt Bessie's birthday"
        date: 1/11/1950

Feel free to use it any way you want...