iCal Event Maker 11 years of service!!!

I created this tool roughly 11 years ago.

It was a time when I was organizing my personal calendar at the beginning of the year. The company I work at sent out a list of holidays for the year, and I was going to add it one by one to my personal gmail calendar.

I thought, wouldn't it be nice if there is a file that I can just import to my calendar? I would be able to use the same source for my personal calendar and also for the company calendar. I would be able to share it with others as well.

I searched the internet and learned that there was an iCalendar specification for this purpose. I also learned that one iCalendar file can have multiple events in a file.

I found a sample icalendar file. The content looked simple enough to change, so I just created a file manually, using a text editor, containing all the company holidays.

I was able to add this to my personal calendar. I also hosted the file on a company intranet, and subscribed it from my work calendar client. I shared it with my co-workers as well. It worked pretty well.

After being happy with the result, I thought, wouldn't it be nice to have a tool for this?

This is when I decided to make this online tool. 

I wanted to learn the iCalendar specification myself, so I decided to build it without using any iCalendar library available to use. I didn't want to just learn how to use a library, rather, I wanted to learn the file format and the rules, which turned out to be a fun and interesting experience (with some pain when implementing it my self!). 

To this date, all the iCalendar related logic is built by myself.

I think I created it using few nights at home. Probably spent few more nights testing it. Then released it. At the beginning, the program was much simpler compared to what it is today. It didn't have timezone support and other features at the time.

After some time, I started to get feedback from users having issues and requests. I fixed the issues and added features that made sense to me. Slowly, the program grew with functionality and became what it is today.

The tool wouldn't have grew this much without all the feedback from the users. I would like to thank everyone who used this tool and who have given feedback.

I also want to thank for those who made donation through the "Buy me coffee" button. It literally buys me coffee, and some snacks as well.   : - )

Thank you!

iCal Event Maker has a new look and feel

This is little old news, but iCal Event Maker has a new look and feel.

I believe this makes it easier to use it.

 

iCal Event Maker now supports SSL (HTTPS)

Security is important for every one.

iCal Event Maker now supports SSL (HTTPS) to increase security.

Alert (Reminder) option for iCal - iCalendar (.ics) download added

In the past many users have requested for a functionality to add Alert (Reminder) to the iCal - iCalendar (.ics) file that the user can download.

The functionality is added to the tool now and available for anyone to use.

>> Create iCal -  iCalendar (.ics) here <<

Some screen shots of the available options:

Download iCal File without Alert (Reminder)

Alert (Reminder) option. 

Choose "Custom" to fine tune your Alert (Reminder)

Updated: 12H/24H time display, New event dialog, and export file filename.

A tool to create iCal (iCalendar .ics) event file has been updated.

1. 24 Hour Clock (military time) time display.
You can now choose either 12H (AM/PM) time display or 24H time display.
Use the following switch to change the display on the page:






2. New Event Dialog.
When "Save" is clicked, the dialog will remain open to make it easier to enter multiple events at once.
"Save & Close" will close the dialog after saving it.



















3. Download file name.
The tool will now use the "Title" field as a file name for the download.

All of the changes were made possible because of the suggestions I got through the feedback I received.

Thank you!

Hello, Olá, こんにちは - Portuguese and Japanese support

iCal Maker tool has been from the beginning an application which was able to create event feed (.ics) in many different languages, however until now it had only English interface.

Now the application's interface has been translated to Portugues and Japanese.

I hope this will be helpful to some people.

Special thanks to Rodrigo for providing the Portuguese translation!

If you are interested in providing translation for other languages, please let me know.

iCalendar Maker - now displaying detail info.

Marudot iCalendar Event Maker now shows the description and the location of the event in the list.

Clicking the "Hide Detail" button will hide the information from the list.

iCalendar feed generator - Copy functionality added

Copy functionality was added to the iCal Event Maker.

It makes it little easier to create similar events in the same feed.

Feed iCalendar (.ics) file with dropbox

It is easy to host an iCalendar feed so other people can subscribe to it, even if you don't have your own hosting environment.

One solution is to use dropbox.

Dropbox allows you to share your files publicly by putting the files in the 'Public' folder.

*Update 3/6/2013*
I just realized that Dropbox made a change to how you can make your file public.
The following method can still be achieved, but for some the instruction might be little different.
Please read dropbox's article about this.
*End Update*

Here is how you can do this using the iCalendar feed creator tool. You can also use any other tool that can generate an .ics file.

1. Create some events you want to share.
   
   
2. Click "Generate iCal" button.
3. Click "Download iCal File" to start the download.
   
   
4. Save the file to your dropbox's Public folder.
   
   
5. Navigate to the downloaded file, right click and choose "Copy Public link". This will put the public url of this file into the clipboard.
   
   The link will look something like this: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/XXXXXXXX/myevents.ics
   
   
    
6. Share the dropbox link to people who you want to share the event with. Many calendar application will allow you to subscribe to the iCalendar events (feed) hosted with dropbox.
   
   Note: the events will be public. Anyone who knows (or who can figure out) the url can access the feed.