StudentsAchieve to iCal

I’ve extended my code that interacts with StudentsAchieve to allow the harvesting of attendance data for your child. There are now methods in the class to support grabbing attendance for a given date or range of dates and I’ve built a sample script, get-attendance-ical.php, that will grab attendance data for a range of dates and output an iCalendar file suitable for import into an application like iCal or Google Calendar.

Fortunately for me (but alas not for him), [[Oliver]]’s back-to-school cold caught up with him on Thursday, so he was absent, giving me useful data to test my regular expressions for parsing status data out of the StudentsAchieve HTML. So here’s the resulting calendar for him, loaded into iCal, showing attendance (taken twice a day) for the last week:

When I spoke about Applications vs. Capabilities back in 2009 at the Access Conference, it was this kind of thing that I was talking about: I want the entities in my life to participate in an open data ecosystem, not create “destination portals.” Don’t make me login to proprietary systems: instead, allow me to exchange data with you, using open standards, so that I can integrate you into whatever collection of tools I use to support my own particular information management needs.

In other words, build capabilities, not applications.