Getting control of the calendar

As a guy who's head fits well inside a computer monitor shell, I've been helping lead the way for a new website for my church. One of the 'killer apps' we've come up with would be an online-calendar. After researching this earlier this week, I've become facinated with the potential of a standard called 'iCal'.

What's facinating is that you can run several calendars on your PC, and subscribe to others from the internet. I could have one integrated calendar that shows me my wife's schedule, my personal one, my church's, and my co-workers'. You can update and syncronize from any location, if it's posted to the web. There is even a great open source tool that displays the calendar on a website.

The challenge has been in learning how to use it and what the best choices are. While standard with new Apples, there is no driving force for Windows machines. Studying how to use it has been interesting and frustrating.

For right now I've gone the easy route:

• Install Mozilla browser with Calendar plug-in. The calendar plug-in isn't particularly stable, but if I want to run this from multiple locations, I don't want to pay $20 per machine.


• Find a person nice enough to host '.ics' files and run the iCalendar webtool, like www.icalx.com.

As I use it more, I'd like to share my experience here, to help save others the trouble. For now, take a look at the Mets Spring Training Schedule that I copied elsewhere and posted.