Publish iCal calendars without .Mac

Jun 15, '06 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: ocdinsomniac

iCal calendar publishing is pretty darned handy. It lets you view shared calendars by subscribing to them directly in the iCal application. Unfortunately, unless you have a .Mac subscription, Mac OS X Server, or some other WebDAV-enabled server at your disposal, publishing iCal calendars is impossible -- iCal publishing requires WebDAV. But now there's a way.

Box.net offers free 1GB accounts, and their servers run WebDAV. So here's what you need to do, in a nutshell:

  1. Set up your box.net subscription (easy and fast!).
  2. In iCal, publish your calendar (Calendar -> Publish) to https://www.box.net/dav, using your box.net account name (email) and password.
  3. Subscribe to the calendar in iCal (Calendar -> Subscribe) at http://www.box.net/dav/Your_Calendar.ics. NOTE: Do not use https here.
That's it! Your calendar will be automatically refreshed and synced between computers. I use this to sync my Home and Work calendars. It's great, and it's free. What could be better?

Shameless plug: I've written more detailed and illustrated instructions on my blog, but thought this might have wide enough appeal to share here. If you need more help, check out my detailed instructions.

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