The new Rucksack Club meets calendar is now published via the website. This is driven from a public google calendar which can be edited by the coordinators of the various programmes of meets (outdoor, indoor, Wednesday Walks etc) ensuring that the details on the website are always up to date. This is a great technical improvement on the proprietary calendar we have been using for years (and is no longer supported). The other great thing is that any member can, if they wish, “subscribe” to the google calendar and view the meets in their own personal calendars. This will work whatever app/software or webmail service that you use, and is applicable to laptops, mobiles, tablets etc. This means that you can always have the latest details at your fingertips.
Note: to “subscribe” in this context is a technical term, there are no costs involved and you are not committing to anything. It just refers to you receiving updates from the meets calendar automatically.
A few more details about the website:
- On the home page (and many other pagesof the website) you will see a list of upcoming meets on the righthand menu and clicking on any of them will allow you to view the details.
- Either by clicking on the “Upcoming Meets” title or by navigating via “Get Out There” > “Meets Calendar” takes you to the full meets calendar – here you can see meets for the whole year. Many of the later meets are just placeholders at the moment; more details will be added nearer the time.
- It is also possible for the meet coordinators to add files to the meet descriptions, so maps, gpx files etc can be downloaded.
If you wish to subscribe to the Meets Calendar and have all the details available in your personal calendar, you need to set it up in the app/software or web-browser that you use – fortunately, you need do this only once! Once subscribed, all the meets will be visible in your personal calendar and these will be updated automatically (the frequency of the updates depends what email service you use, but is at least once per day).
If you use a web-based email service – gmail, outlook.com, btinternet etc:
- First, open a browser tab and login to your emails,
- Look for the calendar icon and click on it to open the calendar that is linked to your emails.
- There will be a menu item to “add calendar” (or similar wording) select this and chose “subscribe to web calendar” (or similar wording).
- Where it asks for the url for the calendar, you need to copy and paste the following – it’s all one long string of characters
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/e7bcb03526c83f0aefc120954a90b380847d3dcdd63f7c29301ad49b5be1a193%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
- That’s it – it should connect and make all the meets visible in your calendar
If you use specific Calendar app on your phone/tablet, or Calendar software on your laptop. The process is similar, there will be the option to “add a calendar” and subscribe to a web-based public calendar. If you can’t find how to do it, try using the help function in the app/software or ask google (or other search engine) “how to subscribe to a web calendar in xxxx” where xxxx is the name of the app/software you are using.
Hopefully, you will find the new meets calendar useful, get in touch if you have problems or feedback.
Thanks, Ian.