iCal is an easy to use calendar program for personal use. A great added bonus is that iCal makes it easy to share your calendar with other iCal users, or with other compatible calendars like the Now Up-To-Date, Mozilla Foundation’s Calendar or the Windows based Events Sherpa. If you have a .Mac account or access to a WebDAV serverm iCal has the built in ability create .ics calendars that others can subscribe to.

While some web hosting providers like Dreamhost provide WebDAV service with their hosting plans, most don’t.

Even that is not a big obstacle. If you don’t do .Mac or WebDAV there are free services like iCal Share or iCal Exchange that will host your calendar for you.

If you don’t want to use a third party service you are still covered. AutoCal and WebCalX is a $5 shareware program that will do just that. It will even merge multiple calendars into one page, using different colored text for each calendar entry, just like iCal.

Another option is the $8 Applescript iCal2Web. I think the calendars it creates are slightly more attractive than those of WebCalX but they just creat HTML tables that you can edit or style on your own.

The advantage of creating static HTML pages is that it’s easy. There are a couple disadvantages. First, the pages won’t update if you change your iCal entries. You have to create a new page and upload it to your site. In my experience that seldom gets done in a timely manner. Another disadvantage is that you will have to create a separate page for each month and link to them from your other pages. That’s a pain.

So lets look at still more options. Amazing isn’t it how many ways there are to share iCal.

You can use iCal to make blog entries with iBlogiCal. This isn’t so much about sharing calendars as it is about using iCal to post to Blogger. Still, it’s a clever implementation.

But to publish calendars that will update themselves try phpicalendar. phpicalendar is an open source php application to parse and display shared icalendar-compatible calendars on a website. This is my favorite as it works much like iCal allowing you to view calendars by day, week or month views. You subscribe to it with iCal or compatible program and change the web version by changing your iCal entries.

While phpicalendar is a web based extention of iCal, WebCalendar is a web-based multi-user calendar system that offers ical/ics import and export. You can use WebCalendar without ever touching iCal as it was created to be a totally web based application. However, since version 1.1 it has integrated iCal support. WebCalendar is also offered as a one click install with many web hosts. Check to see if your host uses it. Both WebCalendar and phpicalendar require PHP and MySQL to work.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 at 6:40 am and is filed under Software Review, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.