Use Your Mac to Share iCal Calendars

mcwetboy writes "Calendar publishing with iCal requires a .Mac membership or a WebDAV server. Most ISPs and hosting companies don't offer WebDAV -- or at least mine don't -- but you can run WebDAV under Apache on your Mac, and publish calendars and share them among a local network or among multiple users of a single computer. Already two different tutorials explaining how to do this have appeared on the Web: this one at Mac OS X Hints and this one courtesy of Shawn Wall. I'm sure Slashdot readers could offer even more suggestions." I set up mod_dav for the first time within an hour of downloading iCal the other day, with help from this article. Now, if only iCal weren't really slow and buggy ...

Comments

WebDAV and PHP

[qengho]

I kept getting XML errors when restarting httpd after enabling WebDAV. Turns out it's a conflict between Marc Liyanage's otherwise excellent PHP4 module for OS X.

If you need to run both WebDAV and php, use Apple's php module.

Using FTP to upload calendars instead of WebDAV

[wka]

calSync, a shareware application, allows uploading of iCal calendars via FTP instead of webdav. iCal FTP is a freeware app that does the same thing.

I haven't tried either. Reviews for each (calSync, iCal FTP) on VersionTracker are mixed.

Another tutorial

[mcwetboy]

For the record, here's another iCal/WebDAV tutorial (via Forwarding Address: OS X ). They're cropping up all over the place, aren't they? Looks like quite a few people have decided that local publishing would be nice to have.

Mozilla Calendar supports iCalendar/WebDAV also

[lcarstensen]

I'm suprised no one mentioned the Mozilla Calendar project's announcement and roadmap this week. This was posted to netscape.public.mozilla.calendar on news.mozilla.org.

Hello everyone!

Well, its been a long time coming, but I think that the calendar is finally at a release that I consider to be relatively stable, and that performs well. The XPI that is available right now fixes many selection problems, reads in Apple's iCal files from http://www.apple.com/ical/library/ and allows users to publish their events back to a webDAV enabled server. I'm calling this release 0.8.

What this means:
The 0.8 XPI will remain on the website until we release 0.9. We will continue to make XPIs available as they need to be (daily, weekly, whatever) but they may be more unstable than the 0.8 release.

At the same time, we will work towards putting the calendar into the Mozilla default builds. Build issues are being resolved now, and we should be ready to go soon. I imagine we'll see calendar in Mozilla by their 1.5 release (I hope, and assuming all goes well).

The 0.9 Mozilla calendar release will coincide with turning the calendar on by default in nightly builds.

The 1.0 calendar release will hopefully coicide with the 1.5 release of Mozilla, at which point our numbering system will jump up and match theirs.

Hopefully soon we'll have the target milestones in bugzilla. We will start to prioritize the bugs and see which bugs must be fixed for 0.9 and 1.0, and which ones can wait.

Thanks. The latest XPIs are linked off the website. The 0.8 XPIs are available at:
http://www.oeone.com/files/calendar08_linux.x pi
http://www.oeone.com/files/calendar08_windows. xpi

Mike

Mike Potter
Software Developer, OEone Corp.
Mozilla Calendar Project
http://www.oeone.com

Re:Viewing on the web.

[babbage]

Check out Net::ICal, by Shane Landrum. The module hasn't been updated in a while, but now that Apple is basing this [apparently wildly popular] software around interfhance of .ical format files, it may get moving again. Net::ICal is available via CPAN, but also take a look at reefknot.org, the development site for Net::ICal & related materials. Lots of links, sample code, reference material, etc. there.

Like everyone else in the Mac/Unix world, I'm finding this stuff fascinating and am trying to figure out how I can get interchange running between things like iCal, my Palm Pilot, my work-mandated Lotus Notes account, and other fun things on the side. iCal seems like a decent switchboard for a lot of these ideas, but automatiing things with Perl &/or Applescript is also going to be essential....