I've missed readings by several of my favorite authors over the past year, largely because I haven't had a good way to track who's coming to town when. So, being partially insane, I threw together a little Ruby script to extract author visit information from 4 local bookstores and turn it into an iCalendar file, suitable for iCal or Mozilla's Calendar.

The stores are:

• University Books
• Third Place Books
• Elliott Bay Book Company
• Seattle Mystery Bookshop

There are a bunch of little things that I need to do to make this usable for people, but it's almost 2:00 AM, and it works well enough for me. I'll add a web-based iCalendar reader, add per-store iCalendar files, and maybe an RSS feed later. Oh yeah, and add it to cron. Can't forget to add it to cron.

Update: I've made quite a few changes since I wrote this. See the category index for details.