[How to publish your iCal calendar for free]
-- Without using .mac accounts, it is difficult to publish your calendar online for other to view. However using ical Exchange (www.icalx.com), a free service that allows you to publish (and hence subscribe / sync) to each other, you can publish the calendar on your local machine and allow others to subscribe to it. However, this is a one sided service. Ie subscribed calendar are read-only. Although you cannot modify each other's schedule, you can set up your own published calendars so you can "match" schedule looking at both calendars on your ical.
Here are the instructions:
1. Set up your calendar.
- Set up a new calendar on your ical calendar for use in this project. Label it, for example, "Last Train Home cal"
2. Set up iCal settings.
- An account had already been setup. Login: lasttrainhome pass: train
- Click on the "Login" link on the right hand side.
- Login
- Decide if you'd want to make your calendar private / public (password protected or not)
- Copy the links at the bottom of the page (ie http://icalx.com/private/lasttrainhome/) You will need this later back in iCal
3. Publish your iCal
- Go back to iCal on your computer
- Select the calendar you want to publish under the "Calendars" tab on the left
- Click on "Calendar" --> "Publish"
- Under "Publish on", click on the pull down menu and select "A Private Server"
- Enter the URL link you copied out from icalx and entered it into the "Base URL" field
- Login / Pass is your login / pass for iCalx (ie, lasttrainhome / train)
- Click the selections you want. You may / may not want to publish changes automatically depending on your internet connection situation.
- Click "Publish"
- Your calendar is now published onto iCalx. A new calendar is now listed on iCalx page. Refresh your browser if you don't see it yet.
- *To manual update changes to your calendar, you simply go to "Calendar" --> "Refresh"
4. Create Subscribe Link
- Right click on your published calendar --> Send publish email
- A new email will appear containing a published iCal link in the form of (webcal://icalx.com/private/lasttrainhome/(yourcalendarname).ics)
- Email this to others you'd like to share the calendar with
5. Subscribing to Calendar
- Copy the calendar link from the email
- Open up iCal
- Click on Claendar --> Subscribe
- Past in the link
- You will be prompted for login / password if it is a private calendar (ie, lasttrianhome / train)
- Info will be downloaded, and you will be prompted if you'd like to subscribe to "(name of calendar).ics"
- Rename the title if needed be
- Click OK
- A new calendar will appear on under your calendar list. A right angle arrow identifies it as a subscribed calendar.
- Click under Calendar --> Refresh to refresh your subscribed calendar for updated changes on your publisher end.