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I have an app running on heroku that provides users with a calendar feed. This used to work on google calendar, but a few months ago it suddenly stopped working. People can't add their calendar to gcal, and users that already have their feeds in gcal experience issues with the calendar not updating.

I've debugged this for a while, trying to figure out what is wrong, and come to the conclusion that herokuapp.com is on some sort of a grey/black list at google. This is how I came to my conclusion:

  • First I set up the app locally, exposing it to the interwebz using localtunnel. I added the localtunnel-url as a calendar feed and google immediately fetched it.
  • Then I set up a custom domain for my herokuapp, added the (custom domain) calendar url in google calendar, again it was retrieved and indexed immediately.

My findings can be reproduced with the following to urls (in google calendar, add by url):

  • http://devoxxuk13.herokuapp.com/matches?p=[any string here] <-- will not work
  • http://devoxxuk13.andersen-gott.com/matches?p=[any string here] <-- works

(The p=[any string here] is a hack. Google has already indexed the no-param version (before it started acting up) of the url. The param is ignored by my app, but it will make google try to retrieve the calendar again, instead of getting it from the global calendar cache it seem to have).

So, my question is really, why is google not willing/able to get calendar feeds from herokuapp.com?

Kara
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mortenag
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    I had this same problem around a month ago with my Rosenborgkalender - which I based off the code you presented @ JavaZone 2012 I'm not sure I found the solution, but here are some of my notes. - I changed my url to always end with .ics - I moved my app to the new heroku europe region I also experienced different results when testing from work and from home... – Paul May 24 '13 at 21:52

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