The school feed that ruined your calendar
4-minute read
You subscribed to the school calendar because you wanted to know about the two parents’ evenings. You now have 340 events, four of which are yours.
Institutional feeds are published for everyone at once. The school publishes every year group. The club publishes every team, every age band, every training session. The university publishes every lecture in the faculty. The council publishes the bin collections for the whole borough. None of them offer a filtered version, because filtering would mean knowing who you are.
So the feed goes in, your week becomes unreadable, and within a fortnight you untick it in the sidebar — which means you are back to finding out about the parents’ evening from a letter in a bag.
Copy the events that are yours, leave the rest
Mirror the feed into a calendar you own, and put a filter on the way through. The copy keeps only what survives the filter, so the calendar you actually look at holds four events instead of 340 — and the noisy original can be unticked for good, without losing anything.
The filters that do the work
- Words in the title. Keep only events whose title contains Year 8, or reject everything containing Staff. Plain case-insensitive text, matched anywhere in the title — several patterns at once, and a rule that either includes or rejects, never both.
- All-day events. The single biggest source of clutter in institutional feeds: term dates, awareness weeks, “non-uniform day”. One switch drops the lot.
- Time of day, and days of the week. Keep 08:00–18:00 on weekdays, or drop everything in those hours if what you want is only the evening fixtures.
- Duration. Skip anything under fifteen minutes, or anything over four hours — the bounds that separate a fixture from a whole-day festival.
- Free, declined and canceled. Events the organiser has already withdrawn, or that don’t claim your time in the first place.
Then make the survivors useful
The copy lands in a calendar you own, so it can finally behave like one: your own colour, your own alerts, shared with the other parent, and on every device without each of them subscribing to the feed separately. You can add your own events beside the copies — “leave at 5:30 to get there” — and the app leaves them alone, because it only ever touches its own copies.
What this doesn’t fix
Title patterns are plain text, not regular expressions, so a feed that names things
inconsistently will need a few patterns rather than one clever one. And a filter decision is
final: #public and #private change how much of an event
crosses over, not whether it does, so neither rescues something a filter dropped. If a
filter is cutting too deep, widen the filter.