Mac OS X Hacks

Publishing and Subscribing to iCal Calendars

Publish your own iCal calendars on .Mac or any WebDAV-enabled web server for subscription.

iCal, Apple’s calendaring application for Mac OS X, is already being used by hundreds of people who are publishing their own calendars for subscription. Apple’s site has a bunch of calendars for obvious things like sporting events, television season premieres, and state and religious holidays. iCalShare (http://www.icalshare.com) has even more.

Publishing

Publishing a calendar to a WebDAV server [Hack #95] is just about as simple as publishing to .Mac, since the latter, in fact, uses WebDAV. Choose the calendar you wish to publish in the top-left iCal pane and select Calendar → Publish . . . In the Publish Calendar dialog box (shown in Figure 3-52), select “Publish on a web server” rather than “Publish on .Mac”; the box will expand to accomodate three new fields: URL, Login, and Password. You’ll need to fill in the appropriate location and authentication information specific to your WebDAV [Hack #95] setup. In the URL box, be sure to put only the path where the calendar should be kept on the WebDAV server; iCal will fill in a filename for you (e.g., Home.ics for a calendar called Home). If you’d like to have your published calendar updated live each time you make an alteration to the local copy, be sure to check the “Publish changes automatically” box. When you’re ready, click the Publish button and away your calendar goes.

Figure 3-52. Publishing ...