Publish non-MobileMe-account protected iCal calendars

Oct 20, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: fabrizio

Everybody knows that it's possible to publish an iCal calendar to MobileMe. This way, the calendar will be accessible by anybody. It's also possible to protect the calendar with a password. The downside is that you have to give out your MobileMe login info if you want to share this calendar with somebody.

This hint explains how to publish a password-protected calendar to MobileMe, using a different login. The first step is to build a password-protected website using iWeb. In the Site tab of the iWeb inspector panel, you can set a name and password for accessing the site. This login can (and should) be a different one than the MobileMe account. Let's name this site SharedCal. You can just add a single template page to the site and then publish it to MobileMe.

Now, we have to publish our calendar. These are the steps:

  1. Select the calendar you want to publish from the Calendars list in iCal. Let's say that this calendar has the name MyCal.
  2. Choose Publish from the Calendar menu. Select the changes, subjects, alarms and to do options you want.
  3. Click Publish on a web server to enable that option.
  4. In the URL field, enter http://idisk.me.com/username/Web/Sites/SharedCal/, where username is your MobileMe account. Enter your MobileMe username in the Login field. Enter your MobileMe password in the Password field.
  5. Click Publish.
Once you've published the calendar, if you want to share it with a friend, you can just give him/her this URL:
http://web.me.com/username/SharedCal/MyCal.ics
They will then be able to subscribe to this calendar using iCal, entering the website username and password we set in iWeb.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

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