birthdayfeed

Generate a feed to notify you of upcoming birthdays.

Instructions

The easiest way to get started using birthdayfeed is to create a spreadsheet in Google Spreadsheets with the birthdays you want to be reminded of.

The spreadsheet must be formatted in this way:

Column A is a name, Column B is the year of the birthday, Column C is the month, and Column D is the day. Check out an example spreadsheet here.

If you know someone’s birthday, but not the year they were born, use “0” for the year and you will be notified, but not told how old that person will turn on their upcoming birthday.

Once you have the data in a Google Spreadsheet, you will need to publish it as a CSV file. You do this by following these steps:

1. Click Share in the top-right corner, then select Publish as a web page
2. In the dialog that appears, click Publish now
3. Click the More publishing options link
4. In the window that opens, change the File format to CSV
5. Click Generate URL, and you will get something like http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p2tucntqYYRjKWooqKZEkKA&output=csv
6. Copy the URL, then close the window to return to the spreadsheet
7. Check the box for Automatically re-publish when changes are made

Come back to this page and paste the URL of the CSV file into the data location: field at the top of the page. Subscribe to the feed that is presented to you.

A birthday will appear in the feed fourteen days before it is to be celebrated, which should be enough time to prepare a card or gift for the acquaintance.

Details

Data Location

You don’t have to use Google Spreadsheets to store your data. You can put a CSV file anywhere on the Internet. birthdayfeed does not cache the data location or the data itself.

Leap Day

Some people are born on February 29, but there is not a February 29 in every year. In years without such a day, the birthday will be assigned to March 1. To remove ambiguity, birthdayfeed mentions the original date of birth as well as the next birthday.

© 2009 William Jackson