How can the new MobileMe cloud calendars be published locally?

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Level 2

254 points

How can the new MobileMe cloud calendars be published locally?

I tried upgrading to the new cloud-based MobileMe calendars twice before the forced upgrade date. Both times I was disappointed (as I was this time), because floating timezone events had their times shifted as though I worked for Apple (i.e. to Pacific Time). This is a bug which will just waste my time.

This is a question about something more pressing.

In the past I could publish my iCal calendars locally so that I could put them on a page accessible only to people inside the place I work.

On one of the previous upgrades, I checked that publishing locally still worked. The solution was not obvious, but it it did work: I could change the location of the calendar. Here is the solution in full:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2682021?answerId=12869330022#12869330022

Now when I try to use this solution, I see that the change location menu item seems to be permanently grayed out for calendars under my mobileme account. Does anyone have a new solution?

Here are some things I looked into without finding a solution:

Using symlinks to pretend the calendars were on my web server at work. The new calendars appear to be in one huge cache.
Looking in AppleScript to see if I could periodically export the .ics files over to the webserver. The dictionary for iCal is far too limited for this.

I could manually export .ics files as needed, but this is both painful and open for error---I really need an automatic solution which does not rely on having everyone at work pay for MobileMe.

Help!

Posted on May 6, 2011 11:30 AM

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Answer 1

Bill Rising Author

Level 2

254 points

May 6, 2011 12:46 PM in response to Bill Rising

OK...after better keyword choices I did find that the 'change location' solution does work, but only if the calendar is first shared with the world, and then has its location changed:

http://www.radbrooksolutions.co.uk/rs/Blog/Entries/2011/5/3_MobileMe_Calendar_Up date_and_PHP_iCalendar.html

Does anyone know if information in public calendars can be found in nefarious ways (like by Google)?

FWIW, I did try sharing privately to just myself, so that I could then subscribe to the calendar on the serving machine and push it out as a .ics file...but I cannot share a calendar with myself. Boooo.

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Answer 2

May 6, 2011 1:38 PM in response to Bill Rising

Calendars which are listed under 'On My Mac' can be published in the old way, but willl not sync to MobileMe. Calendars which are listed under your MobileMe login name can be shared publicly but have to be read in a CalDAV client - this includes iCal for Mac users or Google Calendar for non-Mac users. Please see this page:

http://homepage.mac.com/rfwilmut/notes/sharedcalendar.html

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Answer 3

Bill Rising Author

Level 2

254 points

May 6, 2011 2:04 PM in response to Roger Wilmut1

They don't really have to be read using a CalDAV client---what I do with them is use PHP iCalendar (http://phpicalendar.net/documentation/index.php/Main_Page) to publish them as a web page. (This was alluded to in the radbrooks link above.) When they are published on a private server, they get pushed as an .ics text file instead of the binary cache files which are used by the new MobileMe.

So...sharing via a webpage is still perfectly doable. Sharing privately via a webpage seems to be a problem.

I did try everything I could when searching on Google to sneak into a calendar being shared from www.me.com, but could not come up with anything.

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