Divide By Zero - a blog by Kamran Ayub

If you use an RSS reader to subscribe to people’s Google Calendar events, or you use an RSS parser to read your calendar’s feed onto a webpage, you may have realized that there’s not really any good documentation about customizing that feed. Well, actually, there IS but it’s not apparent from doing a simple Google search that you can use the Google Calendar API reference to see how to customize a feed display.

Today I wanted to do a couple things, I wanted to sort the RSS by start date and from the event happening soonest to the event happening later. I also wanted to limit the results to 5 to reduce time for parsing.

Here’s how to do it, it’s quite simple:

https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/[account]/public/basic?orderby=starttime&sortorder=ascending&max-results=5

If you notice, all I did was add some query string values.

orderby: starttime – Order results by when they start
sortorder: ascending – Order from least to greatest (soonest to latest)
max-results: 5 – Limit results to 5 events

You can use the following query string keys to customize your RSS data: Google Calendar API Reference

Tip: If you’re using PHP and SimplePie to parse the RSS, you need to add the following line of code to prevent SimplePie from automatically sorting the items by date:

$feed->enable_order_by_date(false);