Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

A little iCal tool that might make your ICANN life a little easier

Kevin Murphy, May 27, 2013, Domain Services

Yo Dawg!I’ve created a little free service that might make it a little easier for regular participants in ICANN public comment periods to keep track of deadlines.
It’s basically an iCal feed that should automatically update your online calendar whenever a new comment period is created or extended by ICANN.
This is the link: http://domainincite.com/pro/publiccommentcalendar.php
If you click it you’ll see it attempts to download a .ics (iCal) file to your computer. The contents are automatically created, daily, based on whatever deadlines ICANN has published on its web site.
If you use Google Calendar (as I do) you can add the calendar to your existing calendars by clicking the “Other calendars” drop-down in the Google Calendar sidebar, then “Add by URL”.
My Apple-using guinea pigs tell me that the same functionality is possible with the Mac’s built in Calendar software, by clicking on “File” and “New Calendar Subscription”.
It seems to work with Yahoo! Calendar too.
Subscribing should immediately add the 30-odd current public comment deadlines to your calendar, automatically adjusted to your time zone.
Google Calendar screenshotWith Google Calendar, the entries are easy enough to remove if you don’t like what you see. I expect the same is true in other software.
If it’s working properly, updates should be automatically reflected in your calendar on a daily basis.
It hasn’t been tested on any other platforms yet, but iCal seems to be a widely-embraced technical standard so I can’t see why it won’t work everywhere.
As you may be able to tell, I’m providing this service for free very much “as is”. If ICANN changes the layout of it its web site or my code is dodgy, it will stop working properly.
In other words, if it breaks and you miss a deadline, don’t blame me.
But if it does work and it makes keeping track of things a little simpler, feel free to buy me a pint.
Bug reports, suggestions and grovelling thanks to the usual address.