Hacksar

If you are a television aficionado, you probably have noticed that there are more and more TV shows that have captured your interest, and it’s getting difficult to keep track of when each show is airing (and if it’s even on that week). You may have already read about our article on How to Automatically Download Your Favorite TV Shows, but for one reason or another, TED may not be enough. Sometimes, you just want to know if there is an episode that will air this week just so you can either look forward or… not look forward to that day.

You may also have embraced Google Calendar or iCal to keep track of your life’s daily activities and be your personal secretary (I know I have), and so here’s a great way to automatically update your gCal or iCal with the airdates/airtimes of your favorite episodes with no interaction from you. It’s a good-old set-it-and-forget-it. Keep reading for the info.

1. Visit the CAT TV Calendar website and register for a new account.
2. Create your account, log in, and go to “Add Shows to your Filter” link at the top of the page. You will now be at a page with a ton of TV shows.
3. Simply click on the names of all the TV shows you’d like to subscribe to in your calendar, and hit the big Save Filter button at the bottom.
4. Now here’s the slightly tricky part. You’ll be back at the homepage calendar. At the top, you’ll see a link labeled “Download iCal File”. Now if you just click this link and download it, iCal will copy only the shows that they have information for, but it will NOT update itself in the future. Also, you cannot get it to run on Google Calendar this way. Instead, right click on the link copy the URL.
5. (This guide covers how to do this in Google Calendar, but it’s the same process in iCal.) Open up your Google Calendar, and on the left under “Other Calendars”, click the “Add” button, and then press “Add By URL”.
6. Here, paste (rightclick -> paste or Cntr+V) the link you copied from before into the box.
7. Change the word “download” to the word “generate” in the link. This step is very, very important. Your link should now look something like http://www.pogdesign.co.uk/cat/generate_ics/RANDOMDIGITS.
8. Hit add and now your calendar should show up, timings and all, in your Google Calendar. You never have to do anything again!

If you are having trouble with incorrect timings, your timezone may be incorrectly set. That can be changed at the CAT TV Calendar website under the Settings link.

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