Automatically Adding Birthdays to Google Calendar
Have you ever missed 3 important birthdays in a period of 3 weeks? Well I just did and this experience inspired me to create a program to read birthdays out of my Gmail contact’s notes and add them into Google calendar 10 years going forward. I’ll never forget a birthday again!
Here’s how it works:
First, you load your contacts in Gmail contacts. Next you type their birthdays in the notes field. (Gmail offers no pre-defined field for birthdays.)
As an example, here is my abuela [2]:
Next you download my program (birthdays.py but also get cal.py), follow the instructions at the top of the script (Entering Gmail account info and other settings, and installing a few Python libraries), And run it. [1]
Now you’ll have entries in your calendar like this one for all of your friends and family complete with reminders:
I scheduled this program to run once a week for me. That way if I add new birthdays it will pick them up. No, it does not yet delete birthdays if I remove someone from my contacts or change their birthday. But it is open source, so please add lots of features.
In creating this program I had to expand my mind a bit to learn about the Google Calendar API. I was lucky to have found Matt Poepping’s previous Python work with the Google Calendar API, where he had done much of the heavy lifting. I ended up expanding his code a bit, and after apologizing to him for the ugliness of my new code, we agreed to launch a full fledged project on Google Code so that everyone can benefit from this young Python library for Google Calendar.
Footnotes:
1. Sorry that running my program is a bit technical right now. If you’re interested in running this and find the directions too intense, just leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do simplify things.
2. Sorry I missed your birthday, Abuela!
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December 1st, 2006 at 1:48 pm
[…] If you’re an avid user of Google Calendar you may also like this post: How to automatically add birthdays to Google Calendar […]
December 6th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
This is definitely too technical for me; any chance for an executable file which would install this on the computers of the technologically challenged?
December 6th, 2006 at 12:53 pm
YE,
I’ve been thinking someone would request this. I’ll see what I can. I hope if I put in the work, a lot of people will find it useful. But yes, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll put a post on this blog when I’ve made it into something user friendly.
December 7th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
Thanks Greg! Seems wierd Google itself has not done it yet.
January 9th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
A customer of mine bought and uses http://www.calgoo.com to sync his GoldMine calendar with Google Calendar.. I think he has Outlook in the mix somehow, but it looked like a very interesting product.. Thought you might be interested
disclaimer: calgoo is not related to me, and while i have downloaded the demo, I haven’t purchased it (or gotten to to do everyhing my customer has…)
January 9th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Thanks Doug. That does look interesting. It looks like it is free too. I wonder how it works? I’m almost tempted to try the demo as well.
May 6th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Why not enter Google Calendar events in realtime.
http://www.mobilegcal.com
January 7th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Hi, this looks great…. I am not technical and am a bit lost. I was just wondering if there was an executable file for it?
Kind regards,
Joy