Establishing Security for your Calendar
It is crucial that you establish security, so no one can change or delete what you have posted! If you do not establish security on Settings and on Editing, anyone can trash your calendar, and we have no way to restore the events that are lost (except that we do back up the event data files every day).
- User IDs and passwords are case sensitive! It's best to use all lowercase letters. Don't use periods or @ signs or any kind of punctuation. You can use spaces in the userid..
- Before any of the 4 levels of security is effective (who can change the settings, who can edit or delete events, who can add events, and who can view events), you must fill in the boxes and click the radio button "userID/Password required" on all levels higher than the level you want to establish. In other words, if you want to put a username and password restriction on who can view events, you need to do the same for each of the 3 security levels above that. If you want to put username/password restriction only on who can change the settings and who can edit events already entered, you only need to fill in the highest two levels.
- As noted above, you can request your lost userID or password from the Calendars Net Security Post.
"Logging In" to your Calendar
You do not need to log in to your calendar, except when the security settings you have created require a userID and password. So, if you do not establish view-level security, for example, then anyone can view your calendar simply by going to its web address, such as http://my.calendars.net/mycalendar. But no one can add events, edit or delete existing events, or change your calendar's settings, unless that person knows the userIDs and passwords you have established for those levels of security (see the instructions immediately above this section).
No one needs to "sign-in" to your calendar at the Calendars Net web site (http://www.calendars.net). Users just go directly to your calendar. If you have set up security on your calendar, it will request a userID and password, when needed.
What if the calendar asks for userID and password and does not provide a box for you to enter the login information? Then you need to change your browser settings to enable logging in. In Internet Explorer, go to Tools, Internet Options, Security, Internet, Custom Level, and go to the bottom of the list of settings. Check either "Automatic logon only in Intranet zone" or "Prompt for user name and password." Unless one of these two options are selected, you will have trouble logging into many web sites.
What if the calendar does not appear to be checking for userID and password but just lets me in? What is probably happening is that you have already entered your settings-level or admin-level userID and password, which your browser caches until you either exit the browser or load a different calendar on Calendars Net. If you think that security is not working, just completely exit your browser, load it again, and try your calendar. We have never seen an actual case where the calendar fails to ask for userID and password, if security has been set on the level the user is seeking to use (view, add, edit/delete, settings/admin), if the browser cache is cleared this way.
Adding Events
To add an event or to edit an existing event, just click on the date or click on Daily, Duration, or Periodic at the bottom of the page.
By "click on the date" we mean click on the day number. If you want to create an event for June 3rd, for example, you click on the 3 in the calendar.
Events can include HTML code, including hyperlinks, tables, colors, and images. You can add Popup Text that will appear in a separate smaller window, but your users will need a browser capable of reading javascript to read this popup window. The popup text also appears in full, with any browser, in the List view. Here is more information on Creating Calendar Events.
- Adding Duration or Periodic Events if Calendar does not Show the Edit Bar: If you have set General Settings to not show the Edit Bar, you can still add or edit Duration or Periodic events by clicking on any date and clicking on Duration of Periodic on the form that then appears.
- Event Must Have Text for Popup to Work: You need to enter some text in the Calendar Text box before the Popup Text feature will work. You can't leave Calendar Text blank, because the program needs something to use as the link to the Popup.
- Periodic Events Bugs:
- The normal recognition of http:// as the start of a hyperlink does not work inside the popup text part of a periodic event. If you want the popup text of a periodic event to include a link to another web site, you need to use the normal HTML tags, like: <a href=http://mypage.mysite.com>My Page</a>.
- The program actually will not set up a periodic event to occur weekly on more than one weekday. In other words, if you set an event to Repeat by Day of Week and then use Ctrl-Clicks to select more than one weekday name (say, Sunday and Tuesday), the event will actually show up only on the first such weekday name selected (in this example, Sunday). If you want an event to repeat weekly (or every 2 weeks or every 4 weeks, etc.) on two different weekdays, then you have to set up two periodic events (one for Sunday and the same event, separately, for Tuesday). The next version of iCal will correct this.
- Annual Events: You can enter birthdays and other events as periodic events that happen on the same date every year, but it is a bit tricky. In the periodic event form, specify the date range within which the annual event will show by using the "From" area and the "Until" area. The actual date that will recur annually is then determined by the month in the "From" area and the date selected from the pick list under "Date(s)" in the box below the "From" area. Then click the button for Every Year in that box. Note: This is confusing and will soon change.
- Exceptions to Periodic Events: Sometimes your meeting won't happen when usually
scheduled (as a periodic event). You can schedule the periodic event, then automatically convert it to individual
"daily" instances. You can then delete any of the daily instances. When you create the event with the
Periodic event edit page, check the box that says Generate Daily Events before hitting Submit. This will create
a series of individual events instead of a periodic event. You can then delete any of the individual instances
of the event. Just go back to viewing your calendar, navigate to the month of the event to delete, click on that
day, and delete that instance.
- Be careful doing this. This is a one-way conversion from an event formula to individual events. You cannot reconvert the individual events into a periodic event formula.
- Also, you can by mistake generate hundreds of daily events, which will be a pain to delete. If you need to delete a lot of such events, you might want to try Offline Editing.
- One Year Extent of Periodic Events as Default: When you create a new periodic event, the form will by default make it persist for 1 year from the first day of the current month (for example, the first Tuesday of every month for 1 year, ending April 1, 2000). You can change this persistence length to whatever you want.
- Colors for Events: You can specify the background color and text color for each event. You can enter any HTML hex color codes. Convenient tables of those codes are located at HexMixer. You can also use color names that are not longer than 8 characters. For example, "skyblue" will work, but "darksalmon" will not. We are working to fix this limitation. We have posted a table of HTML Color Names for reference. Here is an even better table of HTML Color Names.
Editing or Deleting Events
You can edit or delete any event you have authority over. Click on a date or on Daiily, Duration, or Periodic at the bottom of the calendar. You will then see a list of existing events for the day chosen or for the duration or periodic events that affect the current month If the duration or periodic event you want to edit does not show up, navigate to the correct month using the menu at the top.
Click Edit next to the event you want to Edit, and the event details will appear. Make your changes and be sure to hit SUBMIT at the bottom of the frame.
You don't actually need to hit SUBMIT. Anything you have entered in the form is automatically saved, if you click on View Calendar or any of the other hyperlinks (except the links that go to the previous month or next month).
Hitting RESET at the bottom of the form will remove any changes you have made. Hitting CANCEL returns you to the Event List, without making changes to the event you were editing. Hitting DELETE deletes the event you were editing, as does clicking on the scissors next to the event in the Event List.
New Feature: If you edit an existing event and then click the Copy Event box before saving it, the newly edited event will be created, but the old event will not be deleted. This is a fast way to make several similar events to occur on different days, particularly if the days are irregular and cannot easily be tracked with a periodic or duration event. For example, you could create one event, save it, and then edit it (with the Copy Event box checked) to change only its date. You can do this as many times as you need to create the "same" event on various days.
A Bug in Editing Periodic and Duration Events: If you have two very, very similar periodic events (or two very, very similar duration events) scheduled on the same day, you may find that you are unable to edit one of the two events. Instead, if you try, for example, to edit the second event, the edit form will come up for the first event. This happens only when the first 24 characters of both events are exactly the same. Thus, you can avoid this problem by not creating multiple periodic or duration events, which include the same date, which have the same first 24 characters. If this has already happened to you, how can you fix it? Edit the "first event" in the example above so that it no longer has the same first 24 characters as the second event.
Adding Event Categories
A new feature in iCal 3.5 is Event Categories. You can create any number of predefined event categories, each with its own color and border scheme. Then, when you create an event, you can choose from the categories you have created, instead of needing to enter color and border information manually for each event. This is particularly useful, if you want your events to have unusual color schemes (or schemes that match your web pages) that require entering color codes which are easily forgotten. This also enables you to change the color scheme for any set of events, no matter how many, just by changing the color selections for that category.
Note: A category name cannot have any spaces or punctuation in it. It can have an underscore, such as Important_Event.
It is also easy to put a legend for your categories in your calendar's header or footer. Here is an example of HTML code that will show a table of color codes:
<TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="2" CELLSPACING="4"> |
We are working with the program authors to make it possible for merging server users to create sets of categories that will be available on all of the calendars on the merging server. For now, however, you must establish the categories on each separate calendar.
Determining the Order of Events in a Day
Setting the order of events in a day, other than by time, is not easy. We are asking the program authors to make it easier.
Currently, the events appearing in each day are ordered as follows:
1. Duration Events.
2. Periodic Events
3. Daily (single) events with time specified.
4. Daily (single) events with time not specified specified.
So you can do some ordering of events merely by creating a different type of event. For example, say you want a Daily (single) event with no specified time to appear first in the day. Then make it a 1-day duration event, and it will appear first in that day.
Within the category of Daily (single) events, you can sort events within a day by assigning a time to each one of them.
Daily events which have no time specified ("non-time specified") appear in a somewhat random order
Another way to sort "non-time specified" events is to assign to each event a specific time in the event creation form and then make the time "invisible" on your calendar. To make your time assignments "invisible", use the Colors menu to change the Events in the Month colors to white on white. Then at the start of the event text in each event, insert <font color=black>. That way the assigned time for the event will not show up on the calendar, but the events will sort within each day according to the "invisible time" assigned to each one.
Of course, if you associate popup text with the event, then you will need to set Links in the Month also to white on white (using the Colors menu). Just remember to start every event and and every popup text with <font color=black>.
One disadvantage to this "invisible time" method is that all of the times of all of the events in your calendar will be invisible, so you will have to enter each event's starting time as part of the event text, after the <font color=black> tag.
We are also recommending to the program authors, Brownbear Software (http://www.brownbearsw.com/ical/newical.htm), that the program allow the admin to set the Event Time Text font face to null, so that the Event Time Text would actually not appear, if that is what the admin desires.
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