Google Tamil Calendar

For a while now, I use several websites in order to find auspicious days and times based on Tamil astrology. Daily sheet calendars in Tamil provide all the information about a day. However, finding those daily sheet calendars online is a pain. There is not one reliable source out there. Either you go to one of the Hindu temple’s websites or you find local Tamil newspaper online. Even then you have to search there a lot.

One recent finding seems to be reliable since 2009 which I got it from my favorite Hindu temple. But then the problem is every time I need to go through the calendar website and click on drop downs and wait for the image to load. For a long time, I was wondering whether I could add such calendar info, like nalla neram, raaghu kaalam etc. to my Google calendar. Data entry is a tedious work and error prone. Maintenance of those manual entries is also a problem.

When I was browsing some other feature in Google calendar I found out this cool event called Google Event Gadget event. If you ever used Phases of the moon calendar from Google you will notice that the different phases of the moon appear as an image on the specific date instead of a simple event with a start time and end time.

Notice how the events appear as icons in my April 2010 calendar. When you hover over the icon you can show a tooltip and once you click on the icon, you can show a little popup of either an image or a html file. Here I chose to show the image that browse in the other calendar website.

Most of the time you configure the Google Event Gadget event as an all day event. There are several other interesting calendars which are event gadgets. So I wanted to leverage this concept and hence embarked on investigating how to create a custom one.

Google has APIs for all of its products. You download the SDK and their samples and you are pretty much all set. I downloaded the Google Calendar API (version 2.0 at the time of this blog post) for my task. Feel free to explore other APIs as well. This just opened up an interesting door of development for me.

I don’t want to discuss my code here as I am sure if you are a developer who have come this far, you can easily build one. It took 50 minutes for me to familiarize and write my code. I used the Calendar API .NET client library and created a simple Console app in C# to create these events. You may want to consider creating a new calendar for your events instead of merging with your existing default one. If you are interested feel free to drop your email in your comments and I can ship you the code. Or if you would just like to embed the calendar to your Google calendar I can share mine too. I just don’t want to make it public and have anonymous people share and have copyright issues. As for 2011, I will see whether I can collect daily sheet calendar and create these images if this source also goes outdated.

Its not so much about writing the code or finding the calendar. I am so glad that I was able to bring these two together to achieve something that was tedious. Plus it is neat looking too.