ICS

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ICS (AKA iCal or iCalendar file / feed) is a format for calendar files (a form of feed file) used by many programs such as Apple Calendar and Google Calendar, and can be used to share and subscribe to calendars across different systems.

Why

You may want to publish a private (by obscurity) ICS feed on your site in order to subscribe to it from:

• Google Calendar
• iOS Calendar

Both of which are useful calendar readers

How

Publishing an ICS feed is a bit of non-trivial quirky work, as every "consuming application" (Calendar app) supports slightly different versions / overlaps of ICS.

You can either write code to generate your ICS (and cache it statically or generate it on request), or use a service like H2VX to convert a page of hCalendar (or h-events) into an ICS.

How to validate

• https://icalendar.org/validator.html

Tools

• H2VX: a web service to convert microformats1 hCalendar to iCalendar format
• mf2 to iCalendar: a PHP library to convert microformats2 h-feed to iCalendar format
• ...

IndieWeb Examples

Aaron Parecki

Aaron Parecki implements an ICS feed on his site aaronparecki.com since 2016-03-24.