Publishing iCal calendars is most easily done via .Mac or on server using WebDAV.

What if you don’t have a .Mac account or access to WebDAV at your service provider or web host?

You can do it manually, using FTP, but it’s a pain. You have to hunt through iCal’s arcane naming system to find the calendar you want and them mess around with it a bit before uploading it.

Derek Jones has written a walk-through for publishing calendars which takes the pain out of the process by using Automator.

He goes through each step in creating an Automator action for this and includes some useful tips along the way. The post also includes links to two extra Automator actions that are handy in themselves.

This tip also appeared on macOSXHints.ical, sharing, publishing, calendar, automator, transmit, tips, webdav

Advenio has published three Automator actions for iCal.

The Find Past iCal Events action allows you to search for past events based on timeframes of one week, two weeks, four weeks, two months, six months and one year. You can also search just for today’s or yesterday’s events.

The Move iCal Events action moves specified events from one calendar to another, or to a new one.

The Get Date Range String from Events action creates a date range string from the iCal events provided to it.

Like many people I fooled around a lot with Automator when Tiger first came out, and then forgot about it.

Now I’m rediscovering it to automate backups with Transmit . It’s a clever piece of work, especially for code-challenged people like me.automator, ical, actions, events

There are at least two tips floating around on the Internet at the moment, offering “faster” or “easier” ways for emailing a URL while browsing in Safari.

One is an Automator action, the other an AppleScript.

The Automator tip makes hard work of emailing a URL. It’s clever, but it seems to add nothing new. The keyboard shortcut Shift-Command-I in Safari will create a new email with the URL in Mail.app.

If you must use a mouse, dragging the URL from Safari’s address bar onto the Apple Mail icon in the Dock does the same thing.

The AppleScript tip is clever too, but doesn’t seem to add anything either. By the time you have called the script, you could have typed the “Check this out:” which the script prepends to the URL four times. Actually, you could probably type it even faster than that.

It’s amazing what keyboard shortcuts can do.

Here is a list of ten great ones for Mail.app and a comprehensive listing of all the shortcuts documented for Apple Mail.

Or perhaps you want to make your own keyboard shortcuts for Mail.