Posted on: August 11th, 2009 by Famous Phil

Before I get started, my dog is doing much better for those of you who are wondering.

So now that business is out of the way, lets get down to the point of this blog.  A long time ago when I first started using 1&1′s mailxchange hosting, I wanted a way to make my calendar show up on my website and remain updated with my phone, web email access, and outlook.  Through webdav, I was able to achieve this on 1&1′s mailxchange service.  Now that I am hosting my own Exchange 2007 server, I want a similar solution, this blog outlines that solution.

Now that the problem is described, lets start working on a solution.  First there are no direct methods for accessing an ical, ics or similar file directly from an Exchange server that I am aware of or could find on the web.  This is unfortunate and makes the solution a bit harder to make possible.  Being a lazy programmer, I figured I could find a script that is mostly written and just modify it.  Fortunately, I found many scripts that were supposed to work but they were all written in Ruby.  I’m not a huge fan of Ruby and spent minimal time trying to fix the errors with these scripts on my server.  This is when I began searching for a PHP solution to my problem.

Luckily, I did find a PHP script which generates the xml necessary to produce and ical file.  This script was very close to what I needed so I grabbed it.  You can grab the original script I found from here.  I only had to slightly modify this script to make it work on my FamousPhil calendar.  My modifications included changing the download to just saving a file to the local server.  I then added a cron job to automate the running of this script every 6 hours.  My calendar now is updated in 6 hour intervals.

This solution works perfect for me.  I also posted my revised scripts to http://dev.matthouse.us – Script #6 which is directly downloadable here. Simply change the conf.php file appropriately and the ical downloader script will give you an ics file download everytime you open it via the web browser.   I’ve verified that this script contains my entire calendar.

Hopefully this will help anyone else looking for a solution to post their calendar publically on thier own PHP enabled website.

If you would like cheap, reliable Exchange 2007 email hosting – 10GB of space and all the trimmings including you@yourdomain.com, Please visit http://amphosted.com/exchange.html.  All of these features come at a mere $50/year which is much cheaper than any other provider I have seen with these features.  Although I own the server and do most of the management, Amphosted has powerful antifraud tools in place as where Matthouse does not, therefore, they are the official provider of this service.  I also authorized 1 month of FREE service and a 30 day money back guarantee.

Tags: calendar, exchange, ical, ics, webdav
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
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Posted on: February 27th, 2009 by Famous Phil

Today’s blog is about Google since Jordan will be writing about Google today as well.

I wouldn’t believe it if anyone told me they’ve never heard of Google.  I’d also find it extremely difficult to believe that anyone hasn’t used Google ever or benefited from a google query.  Lets face it, Google owns the search industry!  Google also is very efficient at indexing the internet for quick searches.

In recent years, Google has released several new features including, but not limited to, gmail, google earth, google calendar, google docs, and google web toolkit.

I have not tried google docs, however have heard that their terms of service say that google can access your documents whenever they want.  I’m not sure how true this is, so I will say no more. (http://www.jordandelozier.com/2009/02/does-google-0wnz-your-soul/ verifies this).  However with storing private information anywhere on another service, you have to trust other people who have access to your account (administrators).  I’m not sure if I’d like to trust a free service with my documents, regardless of how popular they are, but thats just me.

As for the google web toolkit and google search, I use both often. I don’t think I could live without google search!  I submit a good 100 queries each day to google.   As for the google web tool kit, I love how it simplifies javascript into java.  This has helped me on numerous websites that I’ve developed.

As for google earth, I’ve tried that and it is impressive, however I don’t like the fact that it installs a program to my computer that then interfaces to an internet connection, therefore I’ve uninstalled it and haven’t used it since.

Gmail is also impressive, I tried GMail twice.  I thought that I could make it interface with imap and sync my email to every device I have.  Unfortunately, I found out the hard way that their IMAP sucks.  You cannot upload email to their servers via IMAP to a sent mail folder.  I also found that when using a text based client called pine, I couldn’t access the server due to unfamiliar directory names.  I also hate how they don’t allow unsecure access via IMAP.  I do however like their web interface.

Google calendar is also impressive, and I used this on one website that I created.  Google calendar however has a small problem with it, its embedded and you can’t customize the calendar all that much. It also uses a format that is different from the normal ICS file format so a calendar parser can’t quite parse the google ics files correctly, however this may have been fixed by now.

With mobile applications and google, gmail syncs to a smartphone correctly, however won’t syncronise tasks, calendar appointments and contacts effectively.  I found many bugs with the one software program that does exist to sync the calendar to my mobile phone.

After finding all these problems, I now pay for mailxchange from www.1and1.com.  I got my own domain and it syncs to everything perfectly.  It also provides me with standard ics files to power http://calendar.famousphil.com!   I’m sure that Microsoft Exchange can do this also, however I wasn’t about ready to pay for hosting on Exchange with the very small space allotments most hosts provide.

Because of the sync issues I’ve had and pine issues, I use 1and1′s mailxchange service, and they even provide a storage area like google docs!   I have also read their TOS and they will not release my personal email or documents unless a legal case comes up requiring they do it.  I trust their staff, probably because I pay for it.  Google should allow its customers to pay for services like syncing if you ask me.

Thats enough blabbing about Google   I like thier search and will likely always use google for all of my search needs.  Their mail on the other hand needs some work before I’d consider using it.

Tags: 1and1.com, calendar, contacts, exchange, Google, ics, mailxchange, Microsoft, sync
Posted in Technology
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