Brainstorming a Project

ETA: There are links and credits I need to include here, but Dad needs to de-stress so we’re going out — I’ll edit later.

A month or so ago, I started on a Saints spreadsheet project. It started out with wanting to document/automate the saint books we have around the house, as a way to make liturgical planning easier. It’s also part of my resolution not to waste the resources we have by forgetting to use them on the appropriate dates.

Basically the spreadsheet is arranged by date and includes a list of books about the saint of the day, or the feast day, or the season, etc. Like Jenn, an ideal resource for me would include everything including ideas for crafts, pictures of the saint, books for adults as well as little ones, etc.

I got tremendous help from Anne’s document, Martha’s, Sonya Romen’s, Cay’s Catholic Mosaic and my own resources here at home and some that I found at the library. The spreadsheet is well on its way and you can download the unfinished product here. I *am* looking for volunteers to help out in case you’re interested — please leave a comment or email me at stefoodie AT gmail DOT com.

Since I’m the type of person that can get bogged down with details, and get so involved in a project to the inclusion of everything else, I decided that the 31st would be a great deadline for this project — it needs to be marked FINISHED. I’m also the type of person who tends to complicate things — but I’m thinking once I get over the hump with this, it will make things SIMPLE and EASY for me and the kids… Heh… until the next project of course.

However, today, I’ve been hit with some new thoughts. (I should say, as usual.) Since I’ve been using Google Calendar to schedule our lessons (note to self: write a post on that one of these days), it would be of great help to have the liturgical year and each day’s corresponding activities incorporated into the calendar so I don’t have to go checking back and forth on different sites. BTW, my favorites are Catholic Culture, Women for Faith and Family, Domestic Church, CatholicMom.com, and a couple of others which I forget now.

The best way to do this, or at least the easiest I’ve found anyway, is to import iCal data into Google calendar. I did find some Roman Catholic liturgical calendars all ready for sharing and importing at iCalshare.com — just search for Catholic or religious or liturgical and you’ll find several. I tried it out and it works perfectly, as can be seen in the following screenshot.

The next step now is to convert the spreadsheet data I already have into iCal format, so it can be imported into Google calendar. I can then always have it in front of me, either in my planner as printed out pages from Google, or on this blog. One of my goals always has been that my kids can come to my blog and actually do some of their lessons here, and that’s why I’ve made art slideshows, have music playing, etc. It just hasn’t happened yet the way I want it to happen.

I’ve run into several snags. Tried the ods-to-csv-to-iCal route — didn’t work. Found RomCal, a software that some people have used to generate the iCal calendars they share at iCalshare — downloaded it, but so far can’t get it to work. Trying to find a way now to export to xhtml, but I think I need to understand what xslt is first. There’s also a WordPress plugin that may work, but not for this exact purpose, so that lies somewhere on the horizon. One day. Found this hCalendar creator, but don’t understand it enough to use it yet. There *is* software that converts from iCal to html, xls, etc., so here I am thinking SURELY there’s something out there that will do the reverse!

I *know* there’s a solution out there, I just haven’t found it yet!