GoKawiilCreating a personalised bin calendar
Every spring, my council publish a new bin collection calendar. These calendars are typically published as a single PDF to cover the entire region, with the information packed into a compact design. I imagine this design is for economy of printing – you can print one calendar in bulk, and post the same thing to everybody.
Here’s an example of this sort of compact diagram from South Cambridge, where breaks the county into four different regions:
I haven’t lived in South Cambridge for over eight years so this isn’t my calendar, but I don’t want to tell the Internet where I live by linking to a local council.
For example, if your usual bin day is Thursday, your final collection of the year would be on Monday 22nd December.
This compact representation is a marvel of design, but it’s not that useful for me, a person who only lives in a single house. I only care about bin day on my street, not across the county.
For several years now, I’ve created a personalised calendar which shows when my bins will be collected, which gets printed and stuck it on my fridge. It’s a manual process, but a small amount of effort now pays off across the year.
I start by generating an HTML calendar using Python. There’s a built-in calendar module, which lets you output calendars in different formats. It doesn’t embed individual date information in the <td> cells, so I customise the HTMLCalendar class to write the date as an id attribute.
Here’s my script, which generates a calendar from April 2026 to March 2027:
from calendar import HTMLCalendar from datetime import date class PerDateCalendar ( HTMLCalendar ): """ A customised HTML calendar that adds an `id` attribute to every day (for example, `d-2026-03-27`) and uses single-letter abbrevations for days of the week (M, Tu, W, …). """ def formatday ( self , day : int , weekday : int ) -> str : """ Returns a table cell representing a single day, or an empty cell if this is a blank space in the calendar. """ if day == 0 : return f '<td class=" { self . cssclass_noday } "> </td>' else : current_date = date ( self . current_year , self . current_month , day ) date_string = current_date . strftime ( "%Y-%m- %d " ) return f '<td id="d- { date_string } "> { day } </td>' def formatmonth ( self , year : int , month : int , withyear = True ) -> str : """ Returns a table representing a month's calendar. """ # Store the current month/year so they're visible to formatday() self . current_year = year self . current_month = month return super () . formatmonth ( year , month , withyear ) def formatweekday ( self , day : int ) -> str : """ Returns a table header cell representing the name of a single weekday. """ custom_names = [ "M" , "Tu" , "W" , "Th" , "F" , "Sa" , "Su" ] return f "<th> { custom_names [ day ] } </th>" if __name__ == "__main__" : cal = PerDateCalendar () start_year , start_month = 2026 , 4 end_year , end_month = 2027 , 3 full_calendar_html = ( "<html>" '<head><link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet"></head>' '<body><div id="grid">' ) current_year , current_month = start_year , start_month while ( current_year < end_year ) or ( current_year == end_year and current_month <= end_month ): month_html = cal . formatmonth ( current_year , current_month ) full_calendar_html += month_html if current_month == 12 : current_month = 1 current_year += 1 else : current_month += 1 full_calendar_html += "</div></body></html>" with open ( "bin_calendar.html" , "w" ) as f : f . write ( full_calendar_html )
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