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:

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If you’re interested in some of the details, let me know and I can post links to some of the how-to’s I used - or you can look on del.icio.us - my ID there is dr.hypercube, too.