My calendar

I’ve started to publish my calendar on my website so that everyone can see when I’m busy or free. It may not be terribly useful, but it was pretty easy to do, and a fun little programming exercise. Read on to learn how I did it.

I use Apple’s iCal to manage my schedule, and iCal can automatically publish updates to an iCalendar data file hosted on a WebDAV server (which is basically a file server over the Internet). iCal even scrubs all of the private information — titles, locations and notes — so I don’t have to worry about any of that being stolen by hackers. I already had WebDAV running, so it was easy to get the calendar data up to my server.

With that out of the way, I just needed a way to display the calendar on my website. I considered writhing my own iCalendar display engine, but then remembered that PHP iCalendar would do this for me. PHP iCalendar gives me a lot of flexibility with the display, so I was able to remove all of the material except for the calendar itself.

I’ve embedded it into my website using an iframe. This isn’t the most technologically advanced approach, but it was a lot easier than doing anything fancier. Even if I did use a more advanced approach to integrate the calendar into my website template, it wouldn’t improve the user experience at all. So, no need to bother.

What do you think of the calendar? Make sure to send me those meeting requests and party invitations!