Why Calendar Canary exists
A public events page can load normally and show nothing. The website is up, so nobody is alerted, and the first person to notice is often a visitor or the client. Calendar Canary helps the people who look after those pages work out which side is empty: the calendar source, or the website that displays it.
Who it’s for
Mainly web agencies and freelancers who maintain WordPress sites with public event calendars for venues, community groups and similar clients, and anyone else trying to find out why an event isn’t showing.
What exists today
- A free ICS event checker. It reads a calendar file in your browser and reports how many events are upcoming in the next 30 days. No sign-up, and the file is never uploaded.
- 8 troubleshooting guides for when the file and the website disagree.
- An agency pilot of automatic checks that compare a calendar source with its public page, for five agencies over 30 days. It is a pilot, not a product you can buy yet.
What it doesn’t do
- It isn’t a standards-compliance validator. The checker answers one question, “what’s coming up in this file?”, and says when it can’t answer it fully.
- The checker doesn’t fetch web addresses or look at your website. It only reads the file you give it, up to 5 MB.
- It doesn’t expand recurring events. When they could change the count, the result is marked incomplete rather than guessed.
- It isn’t affiliated with, or endorsed by, The Events Calendar, WordPress or any other calendar vendor. We name products only to describe how they behave.
How we test
- The checker is tested against a set of small calendar files, each with a written expected result: one-off, all-day, recurring, cancelled and time zone cases, and files that aren’t calendars at all. A change that alters any of those results fails the build.
- Guides are checked against official documentation and standards, which each guide lists. Where a guide says “in our test”, we reproduced it on a clean test install and name the versions used.
- Every guide shows when it was last verified and what against. If a step hasn’t been tested on a real install, the guide says so. We don’t change dates for typo fixes.
Tell us when we’re wrong
If the checker gives a result you think is wrong, or a guide is out of date, please get in touch. The most useful report says what you expected, what you saw, and which plugin and version you’re using. If you can, make a small invented calendar file that shows the problem. Please don’t send real calendars with private event details.
When a correction changes a guide’s steps or conclusions, we update its “last updated” date so readers can see it changed.
Who runs it
Calendar Canary is run by Dawson Digital Ventures, a small, independent project. One person reads every message. You can reach us at [email protected].