This tutorial will guide you through 3 parts to help you share your iCal calendar with others. Further more it will show how users are able to subscribe to your calendar using Mac OS X iCal. This is useful if you want to share your iCal calendar with a girl or boyfriend, your family or colleagues.

Part 1 – Setting up an account

To be able to share your calendar you will have to use something called a WebDAV server. I found a internet providing just that service. It is called iCal Exchange and is located on http://icalx.com and looks like this.

Step 1 – Creating an account

In the right hand side of the main site, you can read an overview of the service. In this column there is a link to creating a login. When you click that link the next page that appears looks like this.

Here you type

• Your email
• A username of your choice. The username is also part of the ID that will be used later on for people who wants to subscribe to your calendar.
• A password of your choice. This is for your only. You will have to use this username every time you want to create private accounts for the users that you want to connect to your private calendar. More on this later.

When you have confirmed these details your account will appear and look somewhat like this (where it says username, the username that you have chosen will be written)

At this point you have created an account where your calendar can be uploaded.

Part 2 – Publishing iCal Calendars

Step 1 – Open iCal and Right-click the calendar you want to publish, and click Publish…

Step 2 – Fill in your details

A new menu will pop down where you will have to fill in your details to be able to publish your calendar.

Here you write the name of the calendar. I wrote Private. This is the name that others will see, and will have to use to subscribe to your calendar. I will refer to it as calender-name.

You have to select publish on a Private Server

Your base URL is the one from your account which will look like this

http://icalx.com/private/username/

(the username is of course the username that you have selected)

Afterwards you fill in your login and password details. Select whether you want the calendar to publish changes automatically or not. And if the calendar should publish titles and notes.

When you are done you click Publish and iCal will start uploading your calendar to the account that you created earlier.

Now you have uploaded your calendar.

Part 3 – Creating users for private calendars

Step 1 – Open your browser and return to your account at icalx.com

Step 2 – In the left hand column select passwords

Your browser will load a window similar to this

Step 3 – Setting up a new user

→ Click Add a password

The next page will look like this:

Here you select a username and a password for the user that would like to subscribe to your private calendar.

That is it your are done users can now subscribe to your calendar by going to this address in their browser, http://icalx.com/private/username/calendar-name.ics

Here they will have to fill in their details. Afterwards a lot of text will be loaded in their browser. This is because we have opened the calendar-name.ics in the browser. But we had to do this in order to type in the username and password.

The user can now copy the url from above into their iCal, select subscribe and paste the url. This will load your calendar in the users iCal.

Further possibilities

You can use this feature in collaboration with Google calendar. If you do use this feature with Google Calendar, you will also have the possibility of importing your calendar into your wordpress blog (I have heard that other blogs are also supported, though I have not tested this.)

Tagged: Calendar, Exchange, Free, iCal, OS X, Publish, Share, Subscribe