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Cyclone Events on Google Calendar

Psyclone

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Gold Member
May 29, 2001
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Oakland > Ames > Cedar Rapids
I use Google calendar for work and also for my personal calendar. Each year I would subscribe each sports schedule at Cyclones.com. As a Google Calendar user I would add the calendars I want in the section with the header "Online Calendar Applications".

With each sport I subscribe to in Google Calendar, I change the default name to something English readable. I also customize the color using the official Iowa State athletic colors. That is a bit of work especially if you subscribe many sports. The big problem is the downloaded code is good for only one year, so you have to put in this work each year. It's a pain. But I looked at the subscription code and have a simple solution that seems to work and will keep me from having to do this each year.

In Chrome you add an Iowa State sport to Google Calendar in the "Other Calendars" section using the "Add by URL" menu item. The URL for each sport is listed at Cyclones.com. This is the code listed for football:

http://www.cyclones.com/export/icalendar.dbml?db_oem_id=10700&sport_id=4653&season=2015

I don't know why they do it this way, but they filter by year. If you strip off the "&season=2015" from the code, it will give you all the events they have loaded. This would be the modified code for football:

http://www.cyclones.com/export/icalendar.dbml?db_oem_id=10700&sport_id=4653

Since this is the first year I have modified the URL I thought my new calendar with this code would also have the 2014 football season in it, but it didn't. That surprised me but I went back and looked at my old calendar with the 2014 filter and it was also empty. So it seems they may delete older events. Whether they do or not, it really doesn't matter to me as long as the current year is kept updated. I noticed that the Iowa basketball game had already been updated in the calendar by the time I saw the news it had moved to a Thursday.

I repeat that for each spectator sport so that I can plan my trips and nights at the condo in Ames. But sometimes I want to see the entire Iowa State sports calendar. After I load the primary sports, I add one more URL with all of the sports. All that you need to do is strip off the "&sport_id=####" filter from one of the sports. That will give you an all events URL which looks like this:

http://www.cyclones.com/export/icalendar.dbml?db_oem_id=10700

This URL will duplicate the main sports, but what I do is normally hide this calendar and turn it on only when I want to look at the full calendar. In Chrome's Google Calendar it is one click to show or hide a calendar.

I also customize the color of my calendars. Each person may want to do something a bit different. I used to show women's sports in one color and men's in another. Then I changed to major sports in one color and other sports in another. But what I am doing now is having all the individual sports that I download (FB, VB, MBB, WBB, WR, GYM, SOC) in Cardinal color and the all events calendar in Gold. The official code for Cardinal is #a71930. I set the season ticket sports with light text because I plan my schedule around them, and use dark text for GYM and SOC because I want to be aware of them and will attend if I am already in Ames. For the "all events" calendar that I talked about above, I use Gold which is #fdc82f and use dark text. I normally hide this calendar to not clutter up my calendar and to avoid the duplicate entries. Some of you may want to use only the "all events" calendar instead of individual calendars.

I had called Tyler Rutherford at Iowa State to chat about this and a couple other things, but I never got a call back yet. I would also like to ask him if there is any way to filter on just the home events. I tried guessing at some filter code to use, but I didn't have any success. I may try to call again next week if I don't hear from him. If I could filter just home events I would use Cardinal for home events, and Gold for away or just rely on the all events calendar for away games. That would be ideal. Sorry for this post being so long. If you're not a Google Calendar user, you were probably long gone by now anyway.
 
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