Add to your calendar

Gathin gives you two ways to keep events in your own calendar app: add one event at a time, or subscribe once to a feed that keeps every event you are going to up to date automatically.

Add a single event

On an event page — right in the "you're going" block after you register — you'll find an Add to Calendar button. It opens a small menu:

• Google Calendar, Outlook, and Yahoo Calendar — these open the service in a new tab with the event details already filled in, so you just confirm.
• Download .ics file — this saves a standard calendar file. Open it and your default calendar app (Apple Calendar, Outlook, and most others) adds the event.

This adds that one event as a fixed entry. If the organizer later changes the time, the entry you added does not update on its own.

Events that run over several days

An event longer than one sitting doesn't go into your calendar as a single giant block. How it's split depends on how long it runs and whether it has a schedule:

• One sitting — anything up to 24 hours, including an event that crosses midnight, goes in as a single entry.
• An event with a schedule — you get an entry per scheduled day, and that day's hours run from the start of its first actual session to the end of its last.
• A run of consecutive days (up to a week) — each day gets an entry at the event's own hours. A three-day conference lands as three entries, not one 72-hour block.
• An event that never stops — if the start and end times of day are identical (Saturday 10:00 to Sunday 10:00, say), we read that as a continuous run and leave it as one block. Hackathons don't pause overnight.

Long events need a schedule

For an event running longer than a week with no schedule, only the opening goes into the calendar, and the real date range is stated in the entry's description.

Here's why: a three-month course has a range of 94 days but may only meet on 26 evenings. Only the schedule says which. Without one, writing all 94 days into someone's calendar is more wrong than writing the one day we actually know about.

So if you're organizing a long event, fill in its schedule so attendees can add it to their calendars properly.

The same rules apply to the subscription feed; a three-month course doesn't show you as busy for a quarter.

Subscribe to all your events

If you would rather have every event you join appear in your calendar automatically, subscribe to your personal feed. Open the avatar menu at the top right of the header and choose Add to my calendar.

A window opens with two buttons and a link:

• Apple / default calendar — opens your device's calendar and offers to subscribe to the feed.
• Google Calendar — adds the feed to Google Calendar.
• Feed link — the same subscription address, which you can copy and paste into any calendar app that accepts a calendar URL.

Once subscribed, the events you are going to show up on their own, and the feed refreshes on a schedule — your calendar app checks it every so often, so changes appear after a short delay rather than instantly.

Keep your feed link private

Your feed link is personal to you: anyone who has it can see the events you are attending. Treat it like a password and do not share or post it. If you only want to share a single event, use that event's own public page instead.