iCal and Blogging

Everyone knows that Apple's free calendar application, iCal has been released. One of the niftiest features is subscriptions: you can subscribe to someone else's calendar, much like you can subscribe to a mailing list or someone's RSS feed. Welp, good friend redmonk referred me to a spiffy idea proposed by Jim Roepcke:

I want to make a ... page that generates an iCal file so people can subscribe to the blog in iCal... It would be a nice groupware feature, wouldn't it?

Welp, I've quickly generated one using the template features of MovableType, my blogging software of choice. You can see the template code I used, as well as subscribe to the calendar.

There are a couple of things not-so-perfect (and any ignorance of my own is due to not reading the vCalendar spec, instead merely mimicking a sample calendar I created for this purpose. For one, timezones must be correctly set (my template defaults to US/Eastern, since I'm over in New Hampshire). Then, certain characters, like commas and colons (and probably others) need to be escaped with a backslash, else iCal will stop reading the event at the point of unescaped character. In Movable Type, you can sorta accomplish this by using <MTEntryTitle dirify="">, which will turn your event name into something like "ical_and_blogging", which isn't ideal. Finally, and perhaps most annoying: URLs aren't clickable, so I can't easily jump off to read the complete entry.

I'd be interested to hear anyone else's take on this - be sure to drop an email to morbus@disobey.com with any comments, implementations, or clarifications. Alternatively, you can also leave comments over at the O'Reilly Weblogs. I'll keep my notes updated as I explore further too.

Update: I've continued exploring here.