30 boxes and Rainlendar or Sunbird

Kevin Neely has a neat idea on connecting the online calendar service, 30boxes to desktop applications such as Rainlendar or Sunbird. The key element of it is the ability from 30boxes to export ical file format (.ics):

… Fortunately, 30boxes, even in its infancy, has provided for a couple ways to get to your calendaring data for importing into other applications. The format of choice is called ‘iCal’ which is both a standard format for calendar data and the name of the Mac OS X calendaring app. The OS/X app just connects right up, but I have no idea if it caches the data for offline viewing or not. Sunbird does not, however, so we will need to download the file to our hard drive. You can do this from the ‘Syndication’ page of your 30boxes profile, but that only gets it once, and does not obtain later changes.

To get the changes on an ongoing basis, we are going to want to use a quick script to do it for us. I hacked together a little thing that uses wget to grab the .ics file and place it onto our hard drive…

Actually, you could use the same method in Linux as well as Linux has all the applications mentioned in the article - wget, Rainlendar and Sunbird. So don’t worry it is platform independent!

30 boxes and Rainlendar or Sunbird on Windows - [Kevin Neely]