Incredibly Useful Meetup Calendar Tricks

You can see any, or all, of your meetup.com groups' calendars on Google Calendar. Then you can turn their visibility on and off by clicking them under "other calendars" on your Google Calendar page.

To do it for all your meetup groups together:

1. Go to "Your Meetup Groups" on meetup.com.
   
2. At the bottom of the list you will see "feeds of your meetup groups".
   
3. Right-click the "iCal" link to the right of that
   
4. Click "copy link location"
   
5. Go to your Google calendar
   
6. On the left side, under "other calendars", click Add
   
7. Click "add by URL"
   
8. Click inside the box labeled "public calendar address" and do a Paste
   
9. You will see a long strange URL that begins with "webcal://www.meetup.com/events/ical"
   
10. Click the Add button
    
11. Go back to your Google Calendar page and you'll see all your meetup events in their own color!
    
12. To turn their visibility on and off, look under "other calendars" on the left and click the colored box "My Meetups".

Wow. It's like an RSS feed for your social life. To do it for individual groups, go to the group's calendar page on meetup, for example,

http://www.meetup.com/clevelandwine/calendar/

You'll see two months' worth of calendar. At the bottom it says "subscribe to a feed of this calendar" with an iCal link. You can use this iCal link the same way I described above, to put one group's meetup events into your calendar and be able to turn its visibility on and off separately.

One of the wonderful things about Cleveland is how many things there are to do during the summer months. Many things all on the same evening! It's like drinking from the firehose. I and other members of the Social Media Club have been having scheduling conflicts and we're looking for a solution. upcoming.yahoo.com has also presented itself as a possibility. I like the idea of feeding all of my calendar sources into my Google Calendar and turning their visibilities on and off depending on what I'm looking for. Thoughts?

*****

NOTE: upcoming.yahoo.com also provides Google Calendar feeds. Here's the page for Cleveland: only 1191 events, that's all. Firehose! Click the "subscribe" box and then click "add to google calendar". Or maybe you could choose to be more selective, like subscribing to The Grog Shop's calendar.