Use Google Calendar as Datasource for Holiday Notifications

I wanted to see how difficult it would be to do a simple notification on my site of any basic holidays that occurred on any given day. Sure, it would be simple enough to simply create an array to hold the data in js, and display if the date matched, but I figured I would use a JSON Feed to display the data instead. Turns out Google Calendar has just the thing in their Holiday Calendar Feed.

http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/en.usa%23holiday%40group.v.calendar.google.com/public/basic

If you go to this feed, you'll notice there is a lot of information that needs to be parsed down to use it, so after some fiddling, I came up with the following YQL Feed:

select entry.title.content, entry.summary.content from xml where url='http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/en.usa%23holiday%40group.v.calendar.google.com/public/basic' AND entry.content.content LIKE '% + year + %'

with year being a new Date().getYear() value.

Anyways, here's the script. It simply displays a message in a Div if today falls on one of the holidays.

$(function () {
var d = new Date();
var year = d.getYear();
var shortDay = (d.toDateString()).slice(4, 10);
var query = "select entry.title.content, entry.summary.content from xml where url='http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/en.usa%23holiday%40group.v.calendar.google.com/public/basic' AND entry.content.content LIKE '%" + year + "%'";
$.getJSON(
"http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=" + encodeURIComponent(query) + "&format=json&callback=?",
function (data) {
$.each(data.query.results,
function (index, item) {
for (i = 0; i < item.length; i++) {
var each = item[i];
var date = ((each.entry.summary).slice(9, 16).replace(',', ''));
if (jQuery.trim(date) == jQuery.trim(shortDay)) {
$('<h6></h6>').html('Today is ' + each.entry.title + '!').appendTo('#holidays');
}
}
});
});
});

You can feel free to download this script if you would like to use it.

http://www.joshuablackstone.com/Scripts/HappyHolidays.js.