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Publishing iCal calendars using cPanels Web Disk feature, a .mac alternative

Ever wanted to be able to publish your events calendars online using Apples iCal but don’t want to subscribe to Apples .mac service? With Media72 Hosting you can publish calendars from iCal, and any other application that supports publishing via webdav, just like you can using .mac. Read on for instructions…

Firstly you will need to login to your Media72 Hosting control panel, if you don’t already have an account why not take a look at our range of hosting offerings. Once logged in click on the “Web Disk” icon in the “Files” section, here you will create a web disk user and select a folder the user can connect to.

  1. Enter a login name, this can be anything you want. We will enter the name “chris” for this tutorial
  2. Choose the domain name from the drop down after the @ symbol. Our domain is media72.co.uk
  3. Choose a password, again this can be anything you want. We will enter “chris474″ for this tutorial
  4. The Directory will be automatically completed for you, if you want to change this so something different go ahead. Remember that anything inside a public, web accessible, folder will be visible to anyone unless you password protect it. Also make sure that the directory you enter here actually exists or you will get an error when you try to connect, you can create if if necessary. We will enter public_html/chris for this tutorial
  5. Click “Create”
  6. Click the “Go Back” link

You are now ready to tell iCal to publish your calendar. Open iCal, or the application you want to publish from.

  1. Select the calendar you want to publish and choose Calendar > Publish… from the menu
  2. Choose a name for your calendar. We will use “Birthdays” for this tutorial
  3. Select “a Private Server” from the Publish on: menu
  4. In the base URL you will need to enter your domain name followed by the port 2077, in our case this would be http://media72.co.uk:2077
  5. Enter the login you created earlier, in our case chris@media72.co.uk
  6. Enter the password you chose earlier
  7. Select any options you want to use the click “Publish”

You will now see a dialogue box informing you the calendar has been published with the option to with “Send Mail” or “OK”, if you use the send mail feature you will need to edit the url of your calendar before you send it as iCal will not have the correct public url.

The url of your newly created shared calendar will be your domain name plus the public part if the directory you entered when setting up your web disk user, along with the name of your calendar. In our case this will be webcal://media72.co.uk/chris/Birthdays.ics you can send this link to anyone you want to share your calendar with.

If you would like to publish your calendar using a secure web disk connection instead of using your own domain for the base URL in step 4 enter your server name and change the port to 2078, e.g. https://server.media72.co.uk:2078, all communications to the web disk will now be encrypted.

We hope you find this article useful, if you would like articles on other features please let us know.

One Response to “Publishing iCal calendars using cPanels Web Disk feature, a .mac alternative”

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