Penn Perpetual Academic Calendar

22 April 2021

Penn switched over some time ago to using stanza.co for managing the computer-readable version of the official academic calendar. I've found this annoying for a variety of reasons. Stanza has the a separate calendar for each term (spring, summer, fall) where each must be subscribed to separately, and they crowd the list of calendars. Also you have to go subscribe when each new term calendar comes out; you can subscribe to a few years' worth at a time, though a caveat appears about that below. Each event on the Stanza calendar has a notification associated with it by default, and these go off at 11:30pm the day before. There is a way to disable notifications on a per-calendar basis, but this requires an extra step (for each term, of course!).

Stanza requires that you provide full read/write/delete access to Google Calendar, which is a bit scary.

Nevertheless, knowing the various events of the academic year is important so I bit the bullet and subscribed a year or so ago. In Spring 2021 I noticed that my existing Stanza academic calendar was incorrect - some adjustments like the splitting of Spring Break into various Engagement Days were not showing up. I unsubscribed from my old Stanza calendar and re-subscribed and then the events appeared correctly, though why the old URL broke I'm not sure. When I re-subscribed, I was subjected to a variety of upsells (see below).

Perhaps I should pay $2/month to see my own employer's academic calendar! Stanza is clearly aimed at sports fans. It doesn't seem like a good fit for the minor league of academic calendars.

For me, the upsells were the breaking point. I decided to write a little AWS Lambda function that scrapes the Penn Academic Calendar webpage every day and parses it into an iCal file, which is hosted on S3. You can find it at https://penncalfixer.s3.amazonaws.com/perpetual-penn-academic-calendar.ics. As time advances, the iCal feed keeps up so you don't need to re-subscribe - hence the perpetual aspect of this academic calendar feed. Events for past academic terms are unceremoniously dropped, however, perhaps I will want to fix this later.

While I was cross-checking my perpetual calendar against the Stanza version, I noticed the end date of Advanced Registration for Spring 2021 was off by one day. I emailed the Penn Almanac folks, who fixed the Stanza feed. I didn't get a chance to see the fix before I uninstalled the Stanza calendar. I guess I should have paid $2/month for real-time updates!