Jon Udell has been working on a series detailing how to publish public calendars using different calendar applications. Today’s post was about using iCal to publish a calendar to a WebDAV server.

Publishing using WebDAV definitely works, but as Jon points out, it’s hard to find a free web host that will give you a calendar view of your events. It also tends to be slow for large, frequently updated calendars, because the whole calendar has to be sent every time something changes.

Happily, for Mac OS X Leopard users, there’s a better option. Leopard shipped with iCal3, which includes CalDAV support. CalDAV is a protocol that allows fast (well, faster than WebDAV) multi-user access to calendars.

Chandler Hub was designed to make Chandler Desktop sharing easy, but it’s also a CalDAV server. So if you’d like to publish public calendars and edit private calendars with friends and colleagues, Chandler Hub may be a good choice for you.

Chandler Hub is a free service that, among other things, gives you shareable web-based calendars, editable using the web or a CalDAV client.

So, here’s how to share a public calendar using CalDAV and iCal3.

Sign up for a Chandler Hub account.

1. When you sign up you’ll need to provide an email address

   

2. Activate the account by clicking on the emailed link. Once the account is activated, log in. Initially, your account won’t have any calendars

   

3. You’ll need to create at least one calendar (which Chandler calls a collection) in the Hub, or iCal won’t let you work with the account

   

Configure Apple iCal to sync with Chandler Hub

1. In iCal Preferences, create a new CalDAV account by selecting the Accounts tab and clicking the plus at the bottom left

   

2. You’ll need to expand the Server Options pane so you can enter your Account URL. The URL will be https://hub.chandlerproject.org/dav/users/your_username

   

3. Once you click Add, you may need to refresh by going to the Calendar > Refresh menu. Within a few seconds, you should see your calendars

   

4. [Optional] Now you can add new calendars directly from iCal, but it’s a little tricky. If you’ve already created all the calendars you need, you can skip this step.

   iCal won’t let you drag and drop an old calendar onto your CalDAV account, you can only create a new calendar. To create one, first select one of your CalDAV calendars, then click the plus at the bottom left.

   Unfortunately, when you create the calendar, you’ll get an iCal error message. The error message is mysterious, but happily it doesn’t prevent the new calendar from working. Just click OK and name your calendar.

   

   (Note) Don’t try to delete a Hub calendar from within iCal, delete calendars from the Hub’s web interface. If you accidentally do try deleting from iCal, it’ll make the Hub account unusable. To recover from that, you’d need to delete the account in iCal’s preferences and recreate it. No data should be lost, but it’s a hassle.

5. You should now have a few calendars to work with in iCal.

   

View and share your calendars on Chandler Hub

1. To share a calendar with the world, go back to Chandler Hub and confirm that all your calendars appear in both iCal and the Hub.

   

2. Click the white “i” in a colored box, to the right of the calendar name. You’ll see the calendar info screen.

   

3. To share the calendar with the wider public, click the Invite button

   

4. You can just send these URLs as is, but there’s one last detail.

   Chandler has two main views, a week view and a list view. The default view is list, but that’s probably not what you want if you’re sharing a calendar.

   To change views, look at the small icons near the top left of the screen. The calendar icon is on the right.

   

   If you’d like people viewing your calendar to always see the week view, you can add

   &view=cal

   to the end of your sharing URL.

That’s it! Here’s a link to the example calendar I used to make this blog post, feel free to play with it if you’d like to see how it looks without creating an account.