• Home
  • Blogger
  • Github
  • Travel
  • The Tank Project
skip to main | skip to sidebar

Steven Occhipinti

A braindump.

Google Calendar - Repeating an event on the last <weekday> of the month

I regularly attend RORO - The Ruby on Rails Oceania meetups.
They currently occur on the last Thursday of every month and so naturally I put the event in my calendar. I added the usual details and then selected the "repeat" option and set it to repeat monthly by the day of the week.

This worked well for a while, until one day when I rocked up and it wasn't on.
A later realised that in that particular month there were 5 Thursdays instead of 4 and my calendar event was actually set to repeat "Monthly on the fourth Thursday".
It turns out that the interface Google provide to set recurring events does not allow you to change this.. or at least not intuitively.

After some searching around I found a few solutions:


Use English!

The simplest way is to just write out the event in plain English. For example:
RORO at Inspire9, Richmond on the last Thursday of every month
This will create an event called "RORO at Inspire9, Richmond", with the location field set to "Inspire9, Richmond" and the repetition set to "Monthly on the last Thursday".


Start repeating from an appropriate month

Another fairly easy way is to find a month that actually has 5 Thursdays and make the event start from there. This will set the recurrence to repeat "Monthly on the last Thursday", instead of "Monthly on the fourth Thursday".


Hack the ICS

This solution is probably the hardest, but because the iCalendar format does support this, you could write the code manually. To do this you would have to export the calendar to a file, hack it and import it back.
While it's nice to know this, seems like more effort that just typing what you want in English!


A better solution

.. would be if Google provided an additional option in the little "repeat" popup to allow this!

Or maybe the RORO organiser should maintain there own calendar feed that we could all subscribe to. This would also mean that if a particular meetup was moved or cancelled, all the subscribers calendars would automatically be updated!
Posted by Steve at 22:19
Labels: calendar , Google Email This BlogThis! Share to X Share to Facebook

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20120131
DTEND:20120131
RRULE:FREQ=MONTHLY;BYDAY=MO,TU,WE,TH,FR;BYSETPOS=-1;WKST=SU
SUMMARY:Payday
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Save the above to a .ics file. In google next to other calendars choose import calendar.

This gives you an event on the last weekday of the month

30 November 2012 at 05:14
Steve said...

Thanks!

30 November 2012 at 09:56

Post a Comment

Newer Post Older Post Home

Blog Archive

  • ►  2013 (4)
    • ►  June (1)
    • ►  May (1)
    • ►  March (1)
    • ►  January (1)
  • ▼  2012 (17)
    • ►  December (1)
    • ►  October (1)
    • ►  September (2)
    • ►  August (2)
    • ►  July (1)
    • ▼  May (2)
      • Google Calendar - Repeating an event on the last <...
      • Password management
    • ►  April (2)
    • ►  March (3)
    • ►  February (3)
  • ►  2011 (33)
    • ►  December (1)
    • ►  November (3)
    • ►  October (3)
    • ►  September (4)
    • ►  August (3)
    • ►  July (4)
    • ►  June (6)
    • ►  May (6)
    • ►  April (3)

Labels

android (5) apache (1) arch linux (1) arduino (1) bash (11) calendar (1) compiz (1) design (1) diff (1) email (1) gimp (1) git (3) github (2) gnome3 (1) Google (2) hacking (1) hardware (4) howto (1) htpc (1) java (1) lamp (1) linux (28) Mac (2) minecraft (2) mysql (1) netduino (1) nfs (1) parallel port (1) patch (1) photography (4) php (1) pidgin (2) printer (1) programming (6) python (1) rails (1) regex (5) review (3) ruby (3) Samsung Galaxy S3 (2) Samsung Series 9 (1) security (1) sed (3) ssh (1) sudo (1) tank (2) Toshiba Portege (1) troubleshooting (1) ubuntu (16) ui (2) unity (2) vim (5) webcam (1) websites (3) xbmc (1) xclip (1) xul (1)

Total Pageviews

Sparkline
 
Copyright (c) 2010 Steven Occhipinti. Designed by Conveyancing
High Deductible Health Insurance, Purchase Beats