How to subscribe to your church calendar

Your church calendar can appear in the calendar apps people already use, on their phone, in Google Calendar or in Outlook, and stay up to date automatically. Hubb publishes the calendar as an iCal feed that any modern calendar app can subscribe to.

Getting your calendar feed

1. Go to the monthly calendar page on your website. It’s usually a button or menu item; if you can’t find it, add /Calendar/Month.aspx to the end of your site’s address.
2. Decide which feed you want. Logged in, you get your personal feed, which includes the events relevant to you as a member. Logged out, you get the public feed, which anyone can use.
3. Click the ‘Export’ dropdown at the top right of the monthly calendar and choose ‘ICAL’. A ‘Calendar Address’ dialog opens showing the feed address; copy it.
4. In your calendar app, look for the option to add a calendar by URL or subscribe to a calendar, and paste the address in. In Google Calendar it’s under ‘Other calendars’; in Outlook it’s an internet calendar subscription; on a Mac it’s File > New Calendar Subscription in the Calendar app.
5. Give the subscribed calendar a sensible name, and you’re done: changes to your church calendar now flow through automatically.

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Good to know

• The address you copy already contains a days value (days=150), which is how far ahead the feed reaches. To change it, edit that number in the address itself, say to 365 for a year of events. Don’t add a second days value onto the end: that leaves the address with an invalid or duplicated setting and the feed quietly stops working, with nothing to tell you why.
• On an iPad or iPhone, don’t use ‘Add Account’ or anything asking for a CalDAV server, which is the wrong door and will ask you for servers and ports. You want the option to subscribe to a calendar by URL.
• The feed itself updates as soon as your calendar changes, but calendar apps decide for themselves how often to check, and some take 12–24 hours. If a new event hasn’t appeared yet, that’s usually why.
• The same ‘Export’ dropdown also offers XML, PDF and CSV, handy for a printable calendar or a spreadsheet snapshot.
• Subscribing is better than importing: a subscription keeps itself up to date, while an import is a one-off snapshot that goes stale.