Here’s a Cool Free Service
I’ve decided to let my .Mac account expire when it’s up in 3 months. It’s served me well, but now that I’m running my own server from home, the one reason I used .Mac for (e-mail) has been taken care of. Having never really used any of the other features, they’re of no great loss to me. I just can’t justify spending an extra $99 a year just to have a cool email address.
In pondering my decision early this morning, I realized the only drawback to signing off of .Mac was that I wouldn’t be able to sync my iCal calendars between my iBook and work machine anymore. Not really a deal breaker, but it was a small point of contention. As luck (or coincidence) would have it today, I came across a site that hosts simple iCal calendars (public and private) for free, and makes them available for others to subscribe to or view via the web. The site is iCal Exchange, and I found it while browsing OSX Hints looking for pointers to enable WebDav on my own server to do exactly this.
If you use iCal as I do, with one calendar for Home stuff that you only modify at home, and a Work calendar that only gets changed at work, (but you want to always see them side-by-side) this service is perfect. You can publish either a public or private calendar, and then subscribe to it from different locations. And, since the sitemaster was smart enough to integrate PHP iCalendar into his applcation, you can even view the calendars on the web when (in)convenience calls for it. For those interested, I’ve put up a public Yasu Development calendar if you’d like to view it. Or, if you prefer, you can actually subscribe to it. That way you’ll get all my cryptic notes too.
No, this may not be a complete solution for everyone, but it totally fills the gap for me. The best part is that it’s free, and now that I’ve got the calendar issue out of the way, I have no hesitations about letting my .Mac account lapse.
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