We’ve started using Google Calendars at work to keep track of different seminars, colloquia, etc. However, we also like to keep our regular html calendars because they’re just easier to read and to get a quick view of all talks for a quarter. So what we want to do is have the + Google Calendar button appear on webpages, but not show the actual calendar. We’ll have all the information in our own html calendar. Yes, this requires us to update two calendars, but it makes it easier to read.

So, how do we get just the google calendar button without the calendar? First I tried just making a link using the button using the link that Google provides. This didn’t work. My guess is that it’s sending a POST and not a GET, but I haven’t done any testing to check this. The easier way I’ve found is to just customize the view of a calendar to show nothing and have a width of 120 pixels with a height of 30 pixels. That will show just the button.

google_cal

Then, I just place the iframe on the webpage as usual and we get just the button. An example of this can be found here.