Hack 30 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.
30.1 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 a calendar to WebDAV
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If you decide not to enable autoupdating, you can always manually
push the latest using Calendar Update. And if you decide
to take the calendar down after an event has passed or the local
theater season is over, simply select Calendar Unpublish.
30.2 Subscribing
You subscribe in the same way to a published calendar, whether it was published to .Mac, pushed to a WebDAV server, or exported to an .ics file made available on a web server.
Select Calendar Subscribe . . . to bring up the Subscribe
to Calendar dialog box. Type or paste the published
calendar's URL, including the filename (ending in
.ics). If you believe the calendar will be
updated regularly, check Refresh and select an appropriate frequency
at which iCal should revisit the calendar and grab the latest.
It's up to you whether or not you want to remove
alarms and to-do items from the published calendar; simply click the
associated checkbox to check or uncheck it.
If the calendar has restricted access, click the disclosure triangle next to "Advanced options", check the "Needs authentication" checkbox, and fill in an authorized login and password. The screenshot in Figure 3-53 shows authenticated access to a password-protected calendar in action.
Figure 3-53. Subscribing to a calendar
Click the Subscribe button and you should see the calendar slot itself nicely into your own iCal view of the world.
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?Erik T. Ray
