Creating and Naming your Calendar
Before creating your calendar, you would be wise to join the Calendars Net Private Email List (form is on home page). There may come a time when we have to make changes to Calendars Net that you will need to know about in order to use your calendar. So far we haven't made any such changes, but it could happen. We have been sending out about two messages per month. We also won't give your email address to anyone else or use it for any other purpose.
To create a calendar, click on Create a Free Calendar above. Enter a name for your calendar. It can have up to 16 alphanumeric characters. It cannot have spaces or punctuation (periods, colons, semi-colons, slashes, etc). It is just like naming a DOS file without an extension. The name of your calendar is in fact its file name.
If you have forgotten your calendar's name, contact the Lost Calendar Retrieval Post.
Your Calendar's Address and Linking To It
If Your Users Do Not Use the Email Notification FeatureThe Email Notification feature sends email to your list of addresses when an event on your calendar is added or changed). Your users will probably never use this, so use this web address for your calendar: my.calendars.net/NAMEOFCALENDAR where NAME is the 1-16 character name you entered when creating the calendar.. Give this address to those who will be using your calendar, or put this hyperlink in your web pages: <a href=http://my.calendars.net/NAME>Calendar</a>The my.calendars.net server is not only faster, but it also avoids any Access Problem due to User's Firewall, which is described below. You can also use the older address, www.calsnet.net/nameofcalendar.
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<A HREF=http://my.calendars.net/NAME><IMG SRC="http://www.calendars.net/images/ical2.jpg" ALT="Calendar" BORDER="0"><BR>Calendar</A> |
If Your Users Do Use the Email Notification FeatureIn this very unlikely event, then the web address for your calendar is: email.calendars.net/NAMEOFCALENDAR where NAME is the 1-16 character name you entered when creating the calendar.. Give this address to those who will be using your calendar, or put this hyperlink in your web pages: <a href=http://email.calendars.net/NAMEOFCALENDAR>Calendar</a>You can also use the older address, www.calsnet.com/nameofcalendar.
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<A HREF=http://my.calendars.net/NAME><IMG SRC="http://www.calendars.net/images/ical2.jpg" ALT="Calendar" BORDER="0"><BR>Calendar</A> |
If you want your link to have this small
calendar image, use the code in blue:
I Lost My UserID or Password
You can ask for your userid and password by at the Calendars Net Security Post.
Linking Back to Your Home Page
You can link back to your home page by putting an HTML link in your calendar's title, header, or footer, like this:
<a href=http://www.mysite.com/myhomepage.htm>Link Back to My Home Page</a> |
To see how to put hyperlinks into your calendar's title, header, footer, events, and popup text boxes, see Putting Hyperlinks into your Calendar.
Changing Your Calendar's Name or Deleting Your Calendar
If you want to change the name of your calendar:
- You can abandon the first calendar and create another one. If you do, please contact Calendars Net and tell us to delete the calendar you have abandoned. OR ...
- If you want to save the events you have already entered, contact Calendars Net and tell us to change the name of your calendar.
If you want to delete your calendar, ask us to do so at Calendars Net.
In both cases, you must tell us the settings-level password. Without that, we will not know that you are authorized to delete or rename the calendar. You will find the settings-level password on the Security menu.
Better Access with Alternative Calendar Servers
If you do not use the Email Notification feature, then you will get faster service by using this address to access your calendar:
my.calendars.net/NAMEOFCALENDAR
If you do need the Email Notification feature, use this server:
email.calendars.net/NAMEOFCALENDAR
Here is the HTML code to link to each of these alternative servers:
<a href=http://my.calendars.net/NAMEOFCALENDAR>Calendar</a>
<a href=http://email.calendars.net/NAMEOFCALENDAR>Calendar</a>
Please do not use any of the server's port numbers (8187, 8194, etc.) you might notice in your calendar's address shown by your browser. These may change in the future, which will break your link. But the various virtual directories listed above will remain correct. Linking to the virtual directory name instead of the port number allows us to direct hits to servers that are currently up and running. So please also tell your users not to bookmark addresses that show the port numbers.
Finally, some users may have found Calendars Net via other domain names that search engines index (such as www.calendar.org or www.schedules.net, etc.) that actually point to www.calendars.net. Your calendar's name is as indicated above, part of www.calendars.net.. These other domain names may presently work, but we may later use these names for other purposes.
Another way to speed up access is to reduce the size of your calendar by deleting very old events. On the main Calendar Settings menu you will find the selection Delete Month Events. You can use this to delete entire months of old events, making your calendar load a little faster. Note that this function deletes only individual events and does not delete periodic or duration events.
Speeding Up Your Calendar by Deleting Old Months of Events
If you continue to add more events to your calendar, its file size will grow. The bigger its file size, the slower it displays. If your calendar is large, you can greatly speed up the loading of your calendar by deleting obsolete old months of events.
This will not be useful, unless your calendar has, say, more than 100 events or has a lot of events that have lengthy pop-up text with them. You can see how large your file is by using the Calendars Net Download System and downloading a copy of your calendar datafile to your own computer. If the file is larger than 100k, you most certainly should reduce its size.
From your calendar, go to Administer this Calendar, Delete Month Events and choose which old months to delete. This function deletes only individual events and does not delete periodic or duration events, no matter when they occur.
One precaution you should take before doing this is to use the se the Calendars Net Download System to download a copy of your calendar datafile to your own computer. If you then accidentally delete more months than you intended, you can use the Calendars Net Upload System to upload the copy of your calendar that you downloaded, thereby returning your calendar to its original state.
Note: If you by accident delete more months than you wanted to, immediately send email to Restore My Calendar and stop editing your calendar. Usually within 24 hours, we will restore the most recent backup of your calendar file. We backup files on the public server every 24 hours.
If you want your users to continue to have access to the old months, while still having a fast current calendar, you can take one of these courses:
- Go to Administer, Publish Calendar, and choose a block of old months to "publish" to static HTML pages.
- Download those pages to your own computer using the instructions at Posting Static Calendar Pages on Your Web Site "Publish Calendar.
- Post those static pages on your own web site. As long as all of the static HTML pages are in the same directory, they will correctly interlink
- Use Administer, Delete Months to delete the events from the old months (periodic and duration events are not affected).
Request That We Archive Your Big Calendar. Just send email to Archive a Copy of My Large Calendar, telling us the name of the calendar and the last month you intend to delete. For example, if your calendar is named mycalendar and you intend to delete all events earlier than January 2001, you would state that the last month you intend to delete is December 2000. You then wait to hear back from us, before using the Delete Month Events function. We will make a copy of the calendar and name the copy the same as the original, except with numbers at the end to indicate the last month you intend to delete. In the mycalendar example above, we would name the archive mycalendar0112 (because "0112 means 2001, month 12). After we notify you by return email that the archive has been created, you can proceed to delete old months of events on your original calendar. You and the other users of your calendar can still then reach the archived version (in this example, mycalendar0112), although the archived calendar will probably be much slower to load.
Archive Your Big Calendar by Yourself. Use the Calendars Net Download System to download a copy of your calendar datafile to your own computer. Rename that file by adding to it numbers to indicate the last month you intend to delete. For example, if your calendar's filename is mycalendar.cal and you intend to delete all months up to and including December 2000, rename it to mycalendar0112.cal (because "0112 means 2001, month 12). Then use the Calendars Net Upload System to upload the renamed calendar. Then use the Delete Month Events function on your original calendar to delete the old months. You and the other users of your calendar can still then reach the archived version (by putting a "0112" at the end of the address, in the case of the "mycalendar" example above), although the archived calendar will probably be much slower to load.
Create and Save a Set of Static Calendar Pages. You can create a set of static HTML pages for the calendar months you want to delete and post those static pages on your own web site, before you use the Delete Month Events function.
This will create on your web site a group of interlinked months. If your calendar pages display graphic images you have previously uploaded to Calendars Net, you will need to put copies of those images, with the same file names, in the directory where you put your static pages. If the images in your calendar pages are links to images elsewhere on the internet, then you do not need to do this.
You can also create the static HTML pages by downloading the free version of iCal, installing it on your own Windows machine. You can then generate the static HTML files, using steps 1 and 3 from the method described above.
What if Old Events are Missing from My Calendar?
If your calendar file becomes so big that it starts to bog down our servers, and if there is no obvious email address on your calendar or on the web page linked to your calendar, then we may be compelled to delete old months of events from your calendar. In general, we will not delete events less than 6 months old, and we will only delete "daily" events, not periodic or duration events. If we do this to your calendar, and you notice that very old events are no longer there, you will find those events in your archived calendar, which is a snapshot of your calendar that we take just before deleting the old events. Your archive calendar is named xxxx1, where xxxx is the name of your calendar. Thus, if your calendar's name is mycalendar, then your archived calendar is named mycalendar1. You can download your archived calendar using the Calendars Net Download System and entering xxxx1.cal as its name (again, where xxxx is the name of your calendar).
In the very unfortunate event that we have to do this to your calendar more than once, then the second archived version will be named xxxx2.cal, where xxxx is the name of your calendar. If we have to do it again, the third archived version will be named xxxx3.cal. So to be sure you have all the old versions of your calendar, try to view calendar xxxx1, then xxxx2, then xxxx3, etc.
The usual reasons that a calendar become huge is that it has many Periodic Events created with the "Generate Daily Events" option. Using this option can instantly create thousands of daily events. Please use it with caution and only when absolutely necessary.
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