Tech Forum

Posted: **Thu Feb 03, 2011 3:45 am**

chrissv wrote:Hi Sam,
Thank you for the good example on checking myself on the calendar workaround. I enabled Google to tell me when meetings appear and disappear on the calendar, and daily I get anywhere from 2 to 3 bunches of messages telling me that all of my calendar entries have been deleted, and then minutes later that all of my calendar entries are new.

This seems to tell me that during one of the calendar requests, the data was empty (and Google thinks all of the entries have been deleted), and another request has them all there.

Looking at the log for my calendar ID I did not see anything which indicates a problem - all of the log entries have what look to be appropriate responses (no 500 responses, for example). Is there any way to tell for each entry how much data was returned by the LDS calendar request? Something simple like a gross count of characters of the iCal data would be enough to tell if something were wrong or not.

Is there something in the current log that I am missing? Otherwise, is this something you could add as part of your logging?

The code as it stands uses the passthru command and so I don't get access to the character count easily. I'll take a look next time I review the script.

Posted: **Thu Feb 03, 2011 3:48 am**

aliceknd wrote:Like many other people, I have been unable to sync with Google calendar. Sam's work-around worked... sort of. Instead of showing only the calendars that I subscribe to, it shows every event, from every organization in my stake, including every ward (including the ones I'm not in!). It clutters up my calendar with many events that don't apply to me, so this isn't a practical solution for me.

My husband's works fine, and has from day one. The only difference I can see is that he is ward Executive Secretary so he has administrative privileges, though he didn't use any of those functions to sync his calendar.

Any suggestions?

The fix "worked" in that it passed google's request to the lds server and passed the response back. It did not satisfy because you had many items in your calendar that you did not want.

Try entering your official lds URL into your web-browser and download and look at the ical file in notepad, and see if the items you don't want are listed there. I expect that they will be, and that the problem you know have is "why does the lds server return all of the calendars"

Posted: **Thu Feb 03, 2011 5:51 am**

dburrell wrote:My problem is that Hotmail/Windows Live doesn't allow HTTPS.
The example for the Google Calendar subscription is fine, because it doesn't have HTTPS as the URL.
But when you use it, LDS.ORG routes it to HTTPS, and it fails.
We need a way to use HTTP for Calendars, and not get routed to HTTPS.

You don't have to use https for my work-around, it works with https or http so that should fix that for now.

I think the Hotmail service is behind the times, not supporting HTTPS is just slackness in my opinion, and is the equivalent to be forbidden the use of envelopes by the postal service so that everything you send may be read by everyone who delivers it - however maybe the LDS developers could work round it by supporting something like ?redirect=no or something for those who need it.

Posted: **Thu Feb 03, 2011 5:27 pm**

Your "wrapper" worked! Hopefully the calendar administrators will figure out how to solve the problem directly soon. But in the meantime, I now have access to the calendar from Google and from my smart phone.

Again, thank you.

Chuck

Posted: **Fri Feb 04, 2011 9:04 pm**

I can't get the calendar to sync either!! I tried the all the workarounds that I could find on this forum ("https://", "www.lds.org", and "new.lds.org"). So far, the only thing that has worked is the "https://mail.liddicott.com" proxy. I really hope this get fixed soon. I would be happy to send any debug information to the developers, just contact me off-list and let me know what you need. Thanks!

Posted: **Fri Feb 04, 2011 9:24 pm**

RussellHltn wrote:Just to clarify my prior message, simply by adding "www" to the link given to me by the calendar app, I'm now able to get the sync with Google working without having to use the liddicott link. Prior to this, I wasn't able to get syncing to work at all.

Has anyone else tried this? Does it work for them?

Well, it DID work. Then it stopped working. I tried https://new.lds.org, but that didn't work either. I gave up and joined the ranks of the liddicott group. Hopefully the church gets this fixed sometime soon.

Posted: **Sat Feb 05, 2011 4:29 am**

Ok...I'm not an IT guy. I don't understand 90% of the posts on this thread, but I understood enough to go to https://mail.liddicott.com/ldscalendar.php/ and test my calendar ID.

The results showed that my ID worked, and I used https://mail.liddicott.com/ldscalendar.php/123456 (where "123456" was my actually 19 digit ID) to add a new calendar to Google, but it didn't work. Looked like it was importing events, but never actually did it.

Could this have something to do with glitches...I'm in Australia and when we first started using lds.org/units a few years ago there were problems exporting items from the stake calendar because the timezone was messed up...I think this issue was covered in forums at that time. Now, when I look at the calendar created in Google (even though events haven't synced), I see that the timezone is GMT +00:00. This is obviously not the correct timezone for me. Anyhow, just wondering if the timezone glitches from the past might still be playing a part in this syncing problem.

Can anyone give suggestions to help me to get this to sync?

Thanks,

Ian

Posted: **Sat Feb 05, 2011 10:49 am**

ianl wrote:Can anyone give suggestions to help me to get this to sync?

A few thoughts:

- Take the URL given by the church and paste it into your browser. You should get a file. Open it up with a text editor and see if you have any events. If not, then something is wrong with what's coming from the church.
- Check that the calendar number is correct. If it's wrong, it won't work. Or at least you won't be getting your calendar.
- Check and make sure you've subscribed to at least one calendar with some events on it.

If the file looks good, then check your Google side. Make sure you've turned on that calendar. If it's highlighted in a color, it should be on. If it's "plain" then it's probably off. The events won't show in your Google calendar if it's off.

Posted: **Sat Feb 05, 2011 4:56 pm**

I'm in Ianl's boat. Still nothing on google calendar. I even had a pm volley with samliddicott, and no luck. My code returns a bunch of calendar data on his site, but won't show anything on google calendar, nor on my phone. Also, I can't save an ics file from his site--IE just says it can't save data from there.
Oddly, Outlook seems to sync just fine with it.
Ugh.
D.G.

Posted: **Sun Feb 06, 2011 10:33 am**

Using this https://new.lds.org/church-calendar/ser ... /<19-digit#> worked for me.
However, I'm noticing that with either the liddicot link or the one above, some stake events didn't show up on my google calendar but they are showing up on by buddies iPad.

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