For those that are interested in keeping tabs on upcoming events the calendar.ics we now dynamically publish based on this blogs posts is one of the easier ways to do it. Today I’ve been playing with this and the sun-bird plugin for thunder bird/fire fox. The sun bird plugin allows you to import (you can even tell it to re-import on start up) remote calendars, such as the Events Calendar.
My only gripe is that the plugin is basically a completely new program and that it doesn’t seem to integrate very well with thunder bird, this could be a whole lot more useful and more to the point, more intuitive, to a whole lot more people. Once I downloaded and installed the plugin nothing on the thunder bird interface actually looked or seemed any different and it took me a fair while to track down the solitaire menu item when I could launch the sun bird interface from, so a big thumbs down on usability. As far as I can see all that it needs to be a little more useful is a little calendar looking item in the main interface that some how indicates events are occurring on certain days and by clicking would open to the plugins normal looking page.
Apart from evolution can anyone suggest any other plugins for thunder bird that integrate better, so that shared calendar events etc for people can better keep tabs of each other by publishing their public calendar to the Internet somewhere?
The link to the calendar.ics might function better with a little work on the “Content-type:”. Currently I am getting “Content-Type: text/calendar” (which WGET might be tacking on by default). My very brief research finds that rfc’s 2445 and 2447 seen to talk alot about ics calender headers with words like “MUST” and “REQUIRED” for some fields on the “Content-type: text/calender” headers.
I sent myself a ics event via Evolution and this
“Content-type: text/calendar; name=calendar.ics; charset=utf-8; METHOD=REQUEST”
was the “Content-type” it created. A little playing around with “Content-type:” and it might function like you want…
Well, this was about 15 minutes of effort and I hope that it is helpfull.
Have fun Ya’ll
Looking at the mime.types file text/calendar is set for ics and icz files, so I assume the webserver is sending the content type correctly, or at least what the apache guys have told it to do…
I have done some more digging and this is the question..
Do want an action that will launch their calender software to accept an Ical Event or an Ical that can be used as a WebCalendar in Evolution or some other calendaring software.
I perhaps wrongly assumed that you wanted the first. What you have works fine for the second…
I don’t know of anything that will get triggered apart from evolution on PC based systems, and can only assume Mac based systems deal with it sanely… Since I’m not using (and don’t want to use) evolution clicking on the link asks me if I want to open it using “less” under ubuntu/linux…
So to answer your question it’d be nice if some app out of the box would cope with ics files properly on linux, but at present they don’t and all I was providing via the links was a way for people to copy and paste them into their apps…