Despite all the extraneous quizzes and horoscope notifications that you get nowadays on Facebook, it still remains one of the better platforms for creating and organising events.
Whenever an event popped up I would manually add it into my calendar (iCal or Google Calendar, depending on the mood). This was a rather tedious task, and inevitably events get forgotten. This post by Tarek and this post was brought to my attention and goes through how to add the Facebook events to your calendar.
The problem is that the calendar programs we love can't read the private events, and just shows the event as "busy".
This complicated PHP script method fixes it, but it seems daunting and scary at best.
There is a better way though, and that is through the magic of Yahoo Pipes.
1. Go to your facebook events page and click on "Export Events"(apparently in the new facebook layout as of Feb 2010, this isn't there, will try to find a way around it once my facebook moves to the move layout)
2. right-click on the fancy link facebook has given us and "copy" the link.
3. Create an account at Yahoo Pipes and "create a pipe".
4. From the left bar, drag the "Fetch Feed" module and paste your facebook event url in.
5. drag the Operators>"Regex" Module and connect the Fetch Feed and Regex module by drawing a line from the circles at the edges of the module.
6. In the Regex Module, clicking on the the "in:" field, should show the option of "item.class". click it.
7. Enter "PRIVATE" in the 'replace:' field and "PUBLIC" in the 'with:' field.
8. Join the Regex module to the Pipe output.
9. Save and 'run pipe'.
10. Click on 'More Options' and right click on 'Get as iCal'
11. paste the URL into your favourite calendar application!
12. Profit?
