Like many others out there I’ve been tossing back and forth about leaving .mac. This year I got my own host and for the intro price, what I’m getting can’t even be considered to be in the same ballpark. But even next year when my hosting comes up, I’ll have way more functionality for almost the same price (if not less as hosting seems to get cheaper every year). The only thing that had me leaning back into .mac was syncing – I needed to be able to get Google Calendar to see what I put into my phone. But with the help of two applications and gmail and some consideration as to what syncing really means to me, I’ve been able to cut my ties with .mac. The two applications, php icalendar and Scalp allow me to take what my phone give to iSync, publish it online and then from there, Google Calendar can read the calendar and I can import it into my various Google calendars if I please. The entire process was rather easy, but there where a few pitfalls that you might want to watch for if you are looking to make the leap.
First, some of the configuration details for php iCalendar require you to know your actual system file path. I would be up the creek here, but I remember seeing that information in WordPress, so I copied it from there.
Second, Scalp installs easily into your system, but doesn’t really show that it’s doing much of anything. What it lets you do is publish via ftp or sftp your ics file to a host. I pointed the upload to the directory that I put my calendars in for php iCalendar. So after my phone syncs to my computer, the calendar that gets updated will be available online (for Google).
After I had my phone talking to Google, I had to get my other calendars up into the Google Calendar. This is generally an easy process as Apple exports iCal calendars as ics files. But this does not mean that there won’t be hiccups. I exported each of my calendars to a file and then tried to upload them into their new online homes in Google. Most of them went up, except for my two busiest and oldest calendars. Google suggest that calendars that are over 1MB be chopped up into smaller bits, but my calendars were maybe 200K at the most. What I had to do there was export them from iCal and then bring them into a new iCal calendar. That seemed to get everything put properly into shape and all but a handful of my events uploaded.
The final step was to enable sharing on my calendars and then subscribe to them via iCal, which would then sync those calendars to my phone every morning (or when I remember) and then of course toss my old calendars (after backing everything up of course).
So what does that leave me with now? Well I have to tell everyone that uses my .mac email address that I’m moving to a new address – that is easy as I forward .mac to my new address (or gmail) for the remainder of my time and send out the reminders as I go along for the rest of the month. But other than that, I now have a calendar that I have access to anywhere there is network access (and if I need those calendars and I don’t have network access, I have them on my phone). If I can’t sync (ie I’m not at my home machine) I can make events and then get SMS alerts to my phone. I think this is a far more flexible solution (and I haven’t touched likely half of the new flexibility that I have) for me.
The downsides, well, using gmail, you have to put up with text ads. But there are skins that you can get to remove those ads if you really want them gone, but in this world, the little noise that those ads generate is certainly tolerable, and as many have found, even entertaining – and as I have found, useful. At least those ads don’t show in the email that gets sent out.
I mentioned that I had to think about syncing as well. What I thought was that I only ever sync to my phone at home – that way if there are any issues, it’s only at one point of contact. This as a reaction to being burned one time too many with .mac’s syncing any device anyplace ideal, but single point unless it’s a computer truth. … back to the story… so if my ical at home is the only one that needs to be able to talk to my phone, then all I really need to do is be able to get that calendar out to the world. Because all my other calendars and contacts are stored online in Google’s Ether, I don’t have to worry about email contacts and phone contacts still use Address Book, and even though it’s an extra step to put that information in two places if I need to, I’ve been noticing that most people send contact info as regular text, not a vcard – so the work is there anyway. Google is always on and that means that my calendars are always active, regardless if I’m on my home machine.
I could go on, but I gotta get into the office.
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