Put dates in your calendar

Your task

Get city dates out of CityScroll and into the calendar you actually use — either one event at a time, or as a list that keeps arriving.

Before you start

• Open Now.
• You need no account and no email address for either route on this page.
• These pages assemble their lists in your browser, so they need JavaScript switched on.
• Have your calendar app in mind. What you do at the end of this differs between Apple Calendar, Google Calendar and Outlook, and CityScroll hands off to your calendar rather than driving it.

Step 1 — Tell a deadline from an event

Now is in two parts, and the difference matters more than it looks.

• Act by lists open action windows ordered by their published deadline — applications, responses, comments, objections. These are things you can still do.
• Happening soon lists hearings, meetings, auctions, effective dates and decisions ordered by when they happen. These are things that occur whether or not you do anything.

A deadline is often published as a day with no clock time, because that is how the city published it. An event usually has a time. That difference decides what you can do next, so read which part of the page a row is in before you try to save it.

Checkpoint: you can point at one row under Act by and one under Happening soon and say which is which.

Step 2 — Take one event into your calendar

Open a meeting's own page. Where the record carries a clock time, the page offers Add to calendar, which downloads a single event you then open in your calendar app.

Where the record has only a day and no time, that control is not offered — and that is deliberate. CityScroll will not invent nine o'clock for a deadline the city published as a date. Rather than put a made-up time in your calendar, it leaves you the date as published and lets you decide what to do with it.

One event is a copy. It does not change afterwards. If the meeting is rescheduled, the copy in your calendar keeps the old time until you replace it.

Checkpoint: you have one event in your own calendar, and you know it will not update itself.

Step 3 — Subscribe to a whole list instead

A subscription is the other route, and it is a different thing: your calendar app fetches a continuing list on its own schedule, so new and changed dates keep arriving.

The control is Subscribe to calendar, and it is deliberately not shown all the time. It appears in the toolbar of a records list only once that list actually holds at least one dated item that can become a calendar entry. If you are looking at a list with no dates in it, there is nothing to subscribe to, and CityScroll shows you nothing rather than an inert button.

To reach it from Now, follow the civic-object row at the top of the page to a collection whose records carry dates — Meetings is the dependable one — and narrow it to what you want. Once the list holds dated items, Subscribe to calendar appears above it.

Checkpoint: the control is visible, and the list under it plainly has dates in it.

Step 4 — Hand it to your calendar app

Choosing Subscribe to calendar opens a panel headed with what you are subscribing to. It gives you two ways across, because calendar apps differ.

• Open calendar subscription hands the address straight to the calendar app your device has registered. This is the short route on Apple Calendar and most built-in calendar apps. Afterwards, set that subscription's own auto-refresh frequency.
• Copy subscription URL puts the web address on your clipboard for apps that want you to paste it. In Google Calendar use Other calendars → From URL. In Outlook use Add calendar → Subscribe from web. Elsewhere, look for "subscribe from URL" or "internet calendar".

Importing a downloaded file is not the same thing. A file is a one-time copy, like Step 2. Only a URL your calendar keeps fetching is a subscription.

Checkpoint: your calendar app lists a new subscribed calendar, and the city dates appear inside it.

What CityScroll can and cannot tell you here

The panel says this plainly, and it is the honest boundary of the feature. Once the address leaves this page, CityScroll has no way to know what your calendar did with it. It cannot confirm that a subscription was added, that it is still there, or that it refreshed. If you want to know, look in your calendar app.

Two more limits are worth knowing before you rely on this for something time-critical.

• Refresh is your calendar's decision, not ours. Google states that changes to calendars added by URL can take up to twelve hours to show up. Apple Calendar refreshes on the interval you set. So do not use a subscribed calendar for a last-minute change — check the record itself.
• A day is kept as a day. A deadline published without a time arrives as an all-day entry rather than an invented hour, for the same reason Step 2 offers you nothing.

A cancelled occurrence is not silently removed either. It stays in the feed marked cancelled, so your calendar shows you that something was called off instead of quietly losing it.

When there is nothing to subscribe to

If Subscribe to calendar never appears, the list you are looking at has no dated items that can become calendar entries. Widen the filters, or move to a list that is about dated things — Meetings, or the upcoming events on Now. Do not go hunting the page for a hidden control: its absence is the answer.

Some rows carry no fixed date at all. Now says so directly, under a heading for actions that are open with no published closing date. Those cannot go in a calendar as a deadline, because the city has not published one; watch them instead, through Following.

A page that says a source could not be reached is a different case again. That is not an empty calendar — it is an unknown one, and the counts you can see cover only the sources that answered. Reload before concluding there is nothing to save.

You are done when

Either one event sits in your calendar as a fixed copy, or a subscribed calendar in your app is filling with city dates — and you can say which of the two you set up, and what it will do when a date changes.