So I'm really digging Sunbird as a calendar application. One of the neatest things it does is let you subscribe to a remote calendar feed. However, the feed is only in the iCal standard. Not that that is bad per se - but I don't know of any good websites that support it. Yahoo has a calendar service - but it has no syndication features at all. What I want is the ability to enter my events online, and then have access to them via Sunbird on any machine I use. Anyone know of a good (and free) calendar service that will output to iCal. If it had RSS output as well that would rock.
I'm actually contemplating on building my own. It wouldn't be that hard since I'd completely ignore the UI. I'd just have iCal and RSS output feeds.
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can sunbird itself be setup as an online calendar?
Hi Ray,
One of the companies that I consult for use http://www.icalx.com/ for their online calendars. They seem pretty happy.
cheers, Joc
On a related topic, check out:
http://www.icalshare.com/
Any ideas if Sunbird can (or plans to) sync with pocket pc apps? (yes, i know i could probably go peruse the faqs...too lazy) :)
synching with my pocketpc is the only thing keeping me on outlook at the moment :(
Joc - it was a bit tricky to get it to work with Sunbird. But it seems to be working ok now. In a little bit I'll try another Sunbird install and see if I can view/edit from there as well.
Do you know whether Sunbird allows sharing informations on a intranet? Such as tasks besides calendar?....
ok...guilt got the better of me so i went and perused the FAQs :)
not too far down:
Does it synch with my Palm Pilot?
The calendar does not yet synch with your Palm Pilot.
since they don't even mention the ppc, i'm guessing it's even further off of their radar than the Palm :(
charlie,
i think the synching is dependant on the types of calendaring software you have installed on your ppc. If the app supports iCal then it should be possible to synch the to together.
As to Max and sharing informations on the interanet - yeah you can share tasks - again they are just stored in the iCal format. YOu just have to be subscribed to that persons iCal file.
One solution (not necessarilly the best) is to have the iCal file stored on a shared location and read it from there. A better solution is to use webDav and auto publish all of your calendars to the webDav server -then other users would subscribe to them via the webDav server.
I use a webbased calendar to publish my sunbird iCal files to my blog. Since my server doens't support webDav I have a simple batch file that uploads my iCal file and downloads my wifes. It makes for an easy sync operation that works nicely for both home and work computers. You can see the webcal at http://phpicalendar.net/ or my personal usage of it at http://rawlinson.us/calendar/
Its pretty nice. I think, if you look at the January calendar on my site I even publish a task.
I am not sure I understand. Does server have to be set up in certain way to allow us to publish calendar remotely (via sunbird)?
I believe all you need is webDav set up on the server you want to share calendars on. The nice thing is you can pick and mix calendar feeds in the Sunbird interface allowing you to easily see what other people are up to.
the integrated sunbird publishing mechanism is via webdav - so if your server is webdav enabled then you don't have to do anything special.
However, if you don't have a webdav enabled server you have to work around that. I use a batch file that ftps my cal up and my wifes down. Overall, its pretty simple really. Whenever I'm done updating my sunbird calendar I just click on a shortcut and my calendar gets published to my webserver. And my copy of my wifes gets synch'd because I download hers. She does the same and we are always up to date with each others calendar.
I go into more detail here: http://rawlinson.us/blog/in...
hope that helps clear up the confusion I might have caused.
Gotcha, thanks!
http://www.rsscalendar.com/...
Nice one Johan - but I'm staying with the icalx site since it lets me write back to it from Sunbird.
I'll check icalx. Pity Outlook does not support iCal (as far as I know) as many business users are looking for a solution that integrates with Outlook - have you come across anything that would allow at least exporting from Outlook to iCal?
Ray, how did it go with updating your calendar from two different "locations"?
I tried icalx.com from two machines and it took me a while before I finally got a hang of sunbird's publishing/subscribing mechanism. I hope the next release will make this whole thing intuitive. Until then, this is what I had to do.
1) Create a local calendar with no publishing details
2) Publish a local calendar to webDAV enabled server
3) Delete the calendar you just created including its local file
4) Subscribe to remote calendar with automatic publishing checked
5) Repeat just #4 with another machine
Bill,
After playing with icalx.com, I went ahead and had my server webDAV enabled using web_dav apache module.
In your blog talking about webDAV and Sunbird, you mentioned that because you were not using Apache, you could not take advantage of web_dav module so you worked around using FTP mechanism with batch script.
I wonder if http://jakarta.apache.org/s... will do the trick in your case since it is java based?
Joshua - I was able to get it to work fine from 2 locations. It is a bit tricky - I kept getting 404 errors at first - but that was my fault probably. It could be easier for sure - but it works.
Just wondering, has anyone tried to write a CF application to read/update an .ics file? I'm not as experienced a programmer as others who post here, and I haven't dived very deeply into all of the technologies I'm mentioning here, but looking at an .ics file it seems almost like an XML document. Has anyone (with more experience than myself) attempted to read in an .ics document as XML to manipulate?
I haven't - but it looks mostly trivial. I'm still consdering writing my own app to let me do events and have it export both ICS and RSS.
My calendar does not yet synch with Palm Pilot.
Does it synch with my Palm Pilot?