A blog about things that interest me, politics, news, media, architecture, development, environment, local history, secularism, web, dublin ireland, tara

Contact me at expectationlost@gmail.com

Thursday 15 May 2014

Oireachtas Calendar

I've turned scraper off for the momemt.

The oireachtas have finally provided a digital calendar with .ics file output which I've been looking for, but it only seems to output one an event at a time, rather then being able to subscribe to an updating calendar and http://www.oireachtas.ie/eventsCalendar/conf/en/events/event-21398.ics its not the proper file (MIME) type.

Why did they go to the bother of creating a digital calendar but then only allow people to add one event at a time, surely allowing people subscribe to an updating calendar would make it truly useful.

Oireachtas Calendar Events

I've written a python scraper which outputs these files each day adding any new information, the Oireachtas calendar file outputs each item in the Dail for one session into one file, I scraped and split these up into separate events.
finaltestdsc.py and simpler collection of each sessions at oircal.py




Full Page version of calendar

http://www.thecatchment.org/oircal/oircal.ics everything in one file
http://www.thecatchment.org/oircal/oircalf.ics everything in one file individualised events
http://www.thecatchment.org/oircal/oircalfcomm.ics Committees
http://www.thecatchment.org/oircal/oircalfsean.ics Seanad in individiual events
http://www.thecatchment.org/oircal/oircalfdail.ics Dail in individiual events

https://www.google.com/calendar/

Other Calendars > Add by URL



to have each house split into individual events and one with everything in one

but it still has all sorts of problems with the Irish language and proper ical format and not managing to deal with every malformation or variance in the source data.

there doesn't seem to be much software that make sense of this info, or say exactly how you make a file compatible.

still have problem with the file not updating due to caching issues, (maybe try adding ?noCache to the url) can't even find a simple way to refresh the file.

I found https://github.com/diN0bot/iCal-Analyzer which counts event by category, but there are no cateogories on the Dail Calendars.

some ical to csv convertors
http://www.gcal2excel.com/
http://www.projectwizards.net/en/support/?f=ics2csv

i've used tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545 icalendar specs and icalendar validators http://severinghaus.org/projects/icv/ http://icalvalid.cloudapp.net/

Government publishes Programme of Dáil Reform September 2013



Dail Reform Legislative Flow Chart

Cabinet handbook

i like timeflow https://github.com/FlowingMedia/TimeFlow/wiki but there no new development on it and it was only desktop so i tried to recreate it with tableau public

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