MacMost Now 272: Publishing An iCal Calendar

You can publish your own iCal calendar to MobileMe or to your own hosted server. Others can then subscribe to your calendar. It is a great way to make a list of events available to others.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Gary Rosenzweig: Hi, this is Gary from MacMost Now. On today's episode, let's learn how to publish your own calendar using iCal and your web server. So back in episode 94 of MacMost Now, we talked about how to subscribe to calendars that are on the internet using iCal. But here's how to publish your own calendar, and once you publish your own calendar to a web server then others can subscribe to it. 
So here we are in iCal, now I'm going to go ahead and select the calendar that I want to publish, on the left, the one called "Gary" in this case, going to go to the "Calendar" menu and to "Publish" and I get this control here. I can go ahead and change the name of the calendar as it's published and I can also choose how I'm going to publish it, 2 options are "MobileMe" and a "Private Web Server". Now, if you do it as "MobileMe", you're pretty much done, it will publish to your "MobileMe" account, and give you a web location where you can tell your friends that the calendar is published. 
If you choose "Private Server" it's going to ask you to fill in a few more things. A base URL is where it's going to get all the information about the server, and where to upload the file. Usually you would start it with an HTTP, which would tell it to upload using web DAV, which is a protocol for communicating between computers and servers. 
Unfortunately, it's not supported by most private servers. The simpler FTP protocol is, and you can go ahead and force FTP by using FTP instead of HTTP, then also you want to enter in the server name, and also you want to enter in a complete path to where you want the file. Now in this case if I just put the server name, it would put the file on the root level, which nobody could access. 
But if I did "slash, public, underscore, HTML (/public_HTML)", it would put it one level down into the web server area, and people can access it from anywhere. Then you use a login and ID, and I want it to automatically publish changes to this calendar, and I want it do "Titles and Notes" but I don't want it to do "To-Do Items", "Alarms", "Attachments", things like that, and I click "Publish" and the result is that I get this message telling me where the ".ICS" file is located and I'm going to copy and paste that. If I send mail, it will include the "FTP colon slash slash (FTP://)" in it, which is not what I want to tell people, I want to tell people it's an "HTTP", which is just the normal way of subscribing to a ".ICS" or calendar file. 
So here I am in the ICal on another computer. To subscribe, I'm going to go and choose "Calendar" and "Subscribe", then I have to enter in a URL. I'm going to do, "HTTP colon slash slash (HTTP://)" and the name of the server. Now, remember when I uploaded it, it was "FTP", not "HTTP" and also I had "public underscore html (public_html)", to tell it I wanted to upload from the FTP side of things into the web folder. I don't need to include that here, I can go directly to the file, which was "Gary.ics".

Comments: 7 Responses to “MacMost Now 272: Publishing An iCal Calendar”

Rodrigo

15 years ago

Thanks for this tutorial. Is there a way to publish iCal to Google calendars? If yes how?. I see on your tutorial larger iCal fonts. How is that done.
Thanks,

Gary Rosenzweig

You don't publish an iCal calendar to Google calendar. Instead, you create a Google Calendar, and then edit it through iCal. Same result, different approach. Just look in your iCal prefs for Accounts and add your Google account. Then you can add any calendar from that account to iCal.
I don't think I'm using larger font sizes in the video. I don't think you can change the size.

sirozha

"Same result, different approach"

That's not entirely true. If you already have an iCal calendar you have been using for a while, and you now want to be able to sync this calendar to Google calendar, and from there, you want to use Google Sync to sync it to your iPhone, you don't want to create a new calendar in Google. You want to publish your existing iCal calendar to Google.

So, I second the original question. Is it possible to publish an iCal calendar to Google?

Well, I suppose you could try to export your iCal events. Then import them into a Google calendar. Then link to that Google calendar in iCal. Not sure which tools are the best for the initial transfer.

André

14 years ago

Thanks this is big help!

Martin

If you publish a calendar with ical this way are only people using macs able to subscribe to it? Can those using pcs also subscribe?

They are published using an standard open format. I'm not familiar with Windows calendar software, but I assume there are many calendar applications and many can read that standard format.

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MacMost Now 272: Publishing An iCal Calendar

Comments: 7 Responses to “MacMost Now 272: Publishing An iCal Calendar”

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