I want to make sure I understand this:<p>You made a VCALENDAR generator with a web-accessible endpoint. It fills in the VCALENDAR with info passed in via URL parameters. And rather than returning a webpage, it just returns the VCALENDAR file.<p>So you send your friends the link, they click it, rather then returning text/html content, it returns a downloadable response consisting of a pre-filled VCALENDAR file with the correct MIME type, and .ics extension.<p>Do I have that right?
Author here, had a lot of fun building this as it's just ~100 lines of Rust code + some CSS/HTML.
If someone is looking for a fun thing to contribute to during Hacktoberfest, the code is on Github: <a href="https://github.com/mre/zerocal" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mre/zerocal</a>
Will mainly use it for myself to send out event links to friends.
The process for making webapps in Rust seems extremely clean compared to other languages (or maybe I'm not exposed enough but I remember making things with Golang and even just JS was <i>torture</i> with common hosting solutions). Props to shuttle.rs and the Rust community!
> I wanted a way to create calendar entries from my terminal.<p>> There is no state on the server, it just generates a calendar event on the fly and returns it.<p>Didn't see <i>that</i> coming. I suppose it's handy that you can call it anywhere curl is installed (or even use the browser address bar as your command line) instead of having to install and run the Rust program locally.
Why do we need a vCalendar file generator? The output of your app is a vCalendar file which is then imported into a Calendar app either manually or through the integration of email and calendar services. So in the end, people still have to use a calendar app. It is much easier to create an event on a calendar app and send the invitation which is actually sending emails with a vCalendar file as an attachment. Besides that, most calendar apps allow exporting the event as a vCalendar file also.
Looks cool but...why not just send the .ics file directly via your IM of choice? Am I missing something here? I don't see the benefit if you still have to click, open file in your calendar, add it to the calendar.<p>Can you tell me why the above wouldn't work and why this is better?
Speaking of zerocal, have you ever noticed that low calorie packaged foods like pickles and cauliflower will put tiny serving sizes on the package so they can advertise 0 calories? I think they round down to zero when it's less than 5 calories.
I'm wondering if this or a similar tool could be hooked into emacs to make working with calendars in emacs a bit easier. I don't think there is a good way to send calendar invites to people from emacs (but happy to be wrong on this one).