Summer is pretty much over and autumn looms. If you find yourself geting a little busier with work and school and want a convenient way to keep up, consider an online calendar. With free software, you can share schedules and keep everyone on the same page — no matter where you (and they) are.
Most major online calendar sites support sharing, including Google Calendar, Microsoft Hotmail/Outlook.com, Yahoo Calendar and Apple’s iCloud. Google Calendar, perhaps the most versatile of the bunch, also supports syncing with mobile devices and even has little perks from the experiments whipped up in Google Calendar Labs to try out.
Online calendars have other perks as well, including the ability to subscribe to calendars created by other people, whether you known them or not. Google supports calendar subscription, as does Hotmail, Yahoo and iCloud. Some sites that track schedules (like the White House) let you add events to your calendar with a click. Most calendar services have a file of holidays you can add in to your personal calendar, which is useful for scheduling and seeing when the kids are off from school. Dedicated calendar-sharing sites are another source. Although it has a lot of outdated material floating about, iCalShare is a good place to browse, especially if you like international football (or NASA mission launches, or the Washington Capitals 2012-2013 season or events in American history.) While designed to work best with Apple’s iCal program on the Mac, you can usually cut and paste the site’s calendar URLs into other programs. For fans of Major League Baseball getting serious about the Series, MLB.com has downloadable schedules for all the teams (click your team and then chose Downloadable Schedules on the next page; here’s a sample).
