Till now I have been using Remind for a simple daily reminder system. It relies on simple text files and sends me daily emails notifying me about stuff.
This works fine really and I didn’t think I will need much more. Then comes the news that Mozilla has released a standalone calendar app called Sunbird. It is early days for this project but it is already very usable. It uses iCal format files which is compatible with all sorts of other applications and most importantly supports storing its files on WebDAV servers.
A quick install of mod_dav on my Apache web server and a bit of setup using authentication to keep things private got me going. Sunbird has some strange things related to blank files on WebDAV servers so you need to put at least 1 entry into a local calendar then publish that calendar to the WebDAV server to create your new calendar. Once that is done you can just subscribe to it.
This was nice, and I was happy, but I got thinking that I would need to sometimes access this stuff without being near my desktop computers – another great thing about WebDAV, multiple desktops all sharing the same calendar – so I thought it would be nice to get this stuff visible on the web.
A quick search around found PHP iCalendar that can view multiple iCal files in a very sexy looking web interface. So I had remote access to the data all sorted.
The problem with all this is of course were notifications, Sunbird seems to have issues sending mail – for me any case – and I don’t fancy keeping it open forever just to get notifications. I then noticed that PHP iCalendar can export your iCal files as RSS! For each iCal file you can get a day, week or month feed. Pop this into your aggregator and you have a nice place to get notifications as well. This leaves Sunbird only to edit the entries really and keeps things nicely integrated into what is quickly becoming the killer app on my desktop, my Newzcrawler.
Once everything was iCal enabled I had a look at iCalShare.com where there are 100’s of iCal files that you can just subscribe to or copy onto your own server. I got UK and SA holidays from there and will be investigating some other stuff.
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