Calendar Hosting On OS X

I maintain my calendars on my MacBook, but I want to share my travel calendar with a few select people. My solution? Host my own WebDAV server. I followed Greg Westin's instructions exactly and now my travel calendar is available for subscription and password protected.

I had hoped that friends could use Google Calendar to subscribe, but that application doesn't seem to support password-protected calendars. So I decided to install PHPiCalendar, an application I have some experience with that renders ical calendars as HTML. That way folks can view my travel calendar by either subscribing to it from within their own calendar program or by going directly to my website.

I was able to follow Greg Westin's instructions for PHPiCalendar almost exactly. The only differences were introduced by my use of PHPiCalendar 2.2.2, the latest version. My first run produced an error: "Unable to write to cache directory. Please check your config." That problem was fixed by setting $tmp_dir to '/tmp' in config.inc.php. Now the calendar displays great...at least from inside the LAN.

Outside access was still not working; it was giving a page can't be displayed error. I modified the httpd.conf file so that the ServerName -- which was not being specified by default -- is set to my actual domain name: rockridgesolutions.com. That did the trick.

Adding password protection was pretty simple, in that the issue is addressed in the FAQ at the end of Greg's document. I decided to simply use the same scheme I defined for WebDAV access, so there was no need to create a new passwords file. It seems to be working, but more testing is required.

As an aside...while performing the configuration, I ran into a problem getting the terminal editor to quit: no matter how I had my System Preferences defined, I couldn't get it to take an F10. I finally got lucky and stumbled upon the Apple-F10 keystroke, which did the trick.