School vacation calendar for Stein am Rhein

The two schools in Stein am Rhein, primary school Schanz and secondary school Hopfengarten, both publish their vacation calendars online. However, these calendars are written as formatted text and published as PDF. This post describes how you can import their calendars into your electronic calendar, such as Outlook or iCal. [This article is also available in German here.]

A version of the calendar which covers school vacation (summer, fall/automn, christmas, sports, and spring vacations) and days off (First of May and Fun Fair) until Summer 2021 is available online ready for import into your calendar application:

The easy way: One-time import into your calendar application

Click here and import the downloaded .ics file into your calendar. The downside of this approach: Your calendar will not be updated, so you will never receive the vacation after Summer 2021. At the time of this writing, this is still a few years in the future, so this may be good enough for now. However, you will not be able to get updates either, if vacation dates are ever changed or I need to fix a mistake.

Subscribing to automatic calendar updates

…avoids these downsides and are not much more complicated.

1. Apple iCal

For example, if you are running Apple’s iCal, all you need to do is to click on this link to get it added to your calendar list, where you can set how often you want the calendar to be updated (weekly is probably frequent enough :-)).

2. All clients

For other clients, go to the application’s “Subscribe to remote calendar” menu item or similar, then copy&paste https://netfuture.ch/SOGo/dav/public/wok/Calendar/2141-503FC400-1-5AF3168.ics into the URL field.

Â 3. For Experts

The above mechanisms download the entire calendar file (currently 33kB) every time it changes; some clients may redownload it once every update period, independent of the changes. If you know your calendar application supports CalDAV, you can also use the following link: https://netfuture.ch/SOGo/dav/public/wok/Calendar/2141-503FC400-1-5AF3168/ . This will only update the calendar items that actually have changed. However, many calendar applications do not support subscribing to an individual CalDAV calendar.