I’ve been doing a little messing around hoping to make some progress on a portable calendar – a schedule I can access anywhere I have access to the net and a browser. Yes, I know that a date book would do much the same thing, but I do this kind of thing for a living – time spent goes in the professional development category. Plus – there’s the ‘ooh, blinking lights!’ factor.
Some things I wanted going in:
- Multiplatform – I have a Wintel desktop and an iBook (pre-Intel). I want to be able to schedule on either.
- Off-network capability – I want to be able to schedule something (likely on the iBook) when I don’t have a net connection.
- Visible via a browser – I want a way to look at my schedule if all I have access to is a browser.
I started by looking at how to sync an iCal (the application) schedule with a Google calendar using iCalendar (the data exchange standard). I tried a variety of approaches and ended up using Mozilla’s Sunbird on both the Mac and Windows boxes; they publish to a WebDAV folder on my server, and I can see the calendar both from Google Calendars and from a new portal I set up for myself at netvibes. Interesting tidbits I picked up along the way:
- box.net – free public WebDAV filespace. Think of this as a small web-based hard drive. You can do almost the same thing with Gmail, but this is the real thing – subfolders and everything. You can set up a 1 Gb file cache that you can access anywhere a browser is available.
- netvibes – there are a lot of portals out there; My Yahoo is the one I’ve used (it’s been a while – I have no idea what you can do with it now). Netvibes offers modules that clinched the deal for me – one will display a published iCal file, another hooks into box.net and a third shows your Gmail inbox. Here’s a screencap of my portal:
