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Graphic Violence

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Create a public Google calendar

We can use Google Calendar to create a smart, integrated calendar for your website. It’s free and it’s easy

Visitors to your website need to see a calendar of your upcoming events, led by your very next one. You, however, can’t be constantly updating and amending your website. But Google Calendar is smart, always displaying your next event and it supports reoccurring events.

Here is Graphic Violence’s demo Google Calendar embedded in this post.

But it is not very pretty. The Google Calendar retains its native styling which does not sit well in our website design. It makes our post look like a scrapbook with the calendar cut from a different magazine and stuck in. And in truth, that is what we’ve done.

And the embedded calendar is not responsive so anyone looking on a mobile phone – and that is the majority of your visitors these days – will see a very cramped calendar.

Doing it the right way

We can integrate that very same Google Calendar in a much prettier, seamless fashion. This is the very same Google Calendar but integrated with a bit of our wizardry.

Create your public calendar

You’ll need a Google account. If you have a Gmail address then you have a calendar. If you don’t have a Gmail address, go ahead and create one, using whatever name you choose. If you have a Gmail account but don’t want to use the calendar attached to it, create a new account. Note, that our integration connects the first calendar. It cannot connect to any subsequent, public calendars.

1: Log in to your Google account and select ‘Calendar’ from the apps
2: The primary calendar, the first one, is the one we will be making public to populate the calendar in your website
2: The primary calendar, the first one, is the one we will be making public to populate the calendar in your website
3: Click on the three dots to open the pop-up and select 'Settings and sharing'
3: Click on the three dots to open the pop-up and select ‘Settings and sharing’
4: Make your calendar available to the public
4: Make your calendar available to the public

Now your calendar is public. Send us the Gmail address this calendar is attached to – you can see ours is [email protected] – and we will connect it to your website.

5: Now your Google calendar is public, we can integrate it into your website
5: Now your Google calendar is public, we can integrate it into your website. Click here to see the live demo of this installation

Populating your Google Calendar

If you’re not familiar with Google Calendar, rest assured it is very simple. Fill in the fields for date, time and location. You can set events to repeat with pretty much any calendar schedule you can think of.

1: Add your event title, date, time and frequency 2: Set the location 3: A single sentence description and link to your event post
1: Add your event title, date, time and frequency 2: Set the location 3: A single sentence description and link to your event post

Keep the description of your event (field 3) to a single sentence ending with a link to full event details in a post in your news feed. We want to keep the calendar listing short for quick viewing by the visitors. That’s it.

Got any questions?

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