FoxBoom!

It would be nice if the “Birthdays” calendar was updated independantly of iCal.

If I add a new contact with a birthday on my iPhone, that birthday doesn’t appear in Google Calendar (via BusySync) until I open iCal.

This is not the best.

If you try to access your Google Calendar in iCal via CalDAV, but iCal tells you “account information not found” or “calendar (whatever) bould not be found”, then check your calendar URL. You probably copied it from the support page with a space on the end.

And yeah, that’s “bould”.

D’oh!

You know what sucks about keeping a calendar?

On my iPhone, I prefer the native calendar application to the Google Calendar web application. On my laptop, I prefer the Google Calendar web application to iCal. I want to be able to create and edit events on the iPhone application when I’m on there, and in Google Calendar when I’m not. On top of that, I need my calendar to be published online so I can import it into my work calendar in the office, and so my housemate can see it.

So far, I’ve had to ditch Google Calendar, and just sync my iPhone with iCal, and have iCal automatically upload my calendar to a private server so my housemate and work can get to it. The problem is, I need to remember to open iCal every time I sync my iPhone, otherwise changes I’ve made on it don’t get uploaded immediately.

This is too much hassle. Like, way too much.

I’ve downloaded the trial version of BusyMac. I’m hoping to be able to use the iPhone native calendar and Google Calendar together, depending on where I’m logged in, use Google Calendar as the public version, and publish my calendar on my LAN via Bonjour.

Yep, that’s nice and simple… kinda. If it works!

What’s a guy to do?

Back in the old days, I kept my personal calendar in iCal, and published it to .Mac so I could view it in Outlook at work.

This was great until .Mac went off line for a month and chewed through my e-mail and wouldn’t give me my calendar backups back (bitter, moi?), so I moved over to Google Calendar, which was brilliant, apart from losing the beautiful iCal interface and the automatic “birthdays” calendar generated from the Address Book.

But now, I have the iPhone calendar application. Google Calendar’s iPhone interface is almost as good, but not over GPRS.

So I figured it was time to go back to iCal so I can sync with the iPhone, but to see if I can publish my calendar somewhere outside of .Mac. I noticed iCal has a “publish to private server” option, but it seems to be WebDAV rather than FTP, and as great as my hosts are, they don’t support WebDAV.

I did a spot of research, and found a couple of free WebDAV hosts, but before I could sign up for any of them… I found out that iCal actually can publish through FTP after all.

Awesome!