Simple iCal Calendar Publishing on iCal Exchange
Last night, I had a mix-up with my daughter's basketball practice schedule - I was sent to the wrong school by my wife. I realized that I needed to put the schedule into iCal, and once there, there should be no reason I couldn't publish it and let her have a look. Even if she didn't, there was value for me in learning how to publish iCal calendars.
I knew the publishing is over WebDAV, and so I started looking for public WebDAV servers that would host this content for me. I have been disappointed that HostMonster doesn't have WebDAV support - but I decided to send them an email this morning just in case they may have recently added it.
[UPDATE: no they do not have any plans to support it.]
I also looked at a site called Box that said it was WebDAV, but I think that's been pulled and it's a less-general web-based file sharing system now. Shucks.
I ended up seeing iCal Exchange a lot, and it turns out that's an incredibly easy way to do it. They have public and private calendars, and it's got adds if you look at the calendars online, but it just works if you don't.
I ended up getting an account, and then publishing the calendar from within iCal to the base URL of: http://icalx.com/public/drbobbeaty/ - this, they tell you right on your account page at iCal Exchange. Very slick.
Once it's published, you can subscribe to the calendars by using the URL: webcal://icalx.com/public/drbobbeaty/nameOfCalendar.ics - it's pretty much idiot-proof. You can even make it a link on a page so that people don't need to know how to type the URL. That's not anything new about URLs, but it's a nice thing about the integration of iCal into Mac OS X.
So I ended up publishing the calendars for our volleyball team, the Rampage and Angelina's basketball team, the Comets. If I update the calendar in my iCal, it pushes these changes to the server, and each subscribed iCal picks it up. Sweet.