Web Notices ical Feed

CSCF Master ST Item

ST#96332

Project Overview

In Fall 2014 the CS Director (mwg) requested that CSCF install a small application written by grad student Sarah Harvey (sharvey). This application was written to scrape the automatically generated webpages for Web Notices and produce a set of .ical files, suitable for subscribing to in one's calendar software. The software is currently maintained by Sarah, and installed in the CS region by Daniel. There is a user-facing page available at https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/events/faculty-webnotices .

Deployment / Maintenance

The application can be deployed from https://github.com/worldwise001/webnotice_ics.git . It is installed on the CS core web server at /software/odyssey-3_apache/data/vhosts/cs.uwaterloo.ca/research/webnotice and runs as user twiki. Installation requires two external libraries/programs:

• python library 'pytz'
• unix command 'tidy' (ubuntu package 'tidy')

There are deployment notes located in the README file within the above directory on the CS core web server.

When there are (infrequent) bug-fixes, those are updated from the above git repo.

The user twiki runs a cron-job three times daily, at 9:51, 13:51, and 18:51, to update the output.

Project Architecture

The application is written in Python. The code is located in the bin subdirectory of the above install directory.

Inputs

The application parses the HTML generated by https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~wnotice/ .

Outputs

The application outputs .ical files corresponding to each Math department/School in the ical subdirectory (publicly visible at https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/research/webnotice/ical/ )

Any cron output is sent to user twiki. This consists of very occasional errors reported by the program due to parsing issues. These have mostly resolved themselves by the following update; on one occasion sharvey had to make a bug fix, which she did within a day. Details, such as they are, are in the above ST item.

-- DanielAllen - 2015-01-05