Calendar "Add By Url" Does Not Refresh At All, Or Not Fast Enough

I'm glad someone started this blog. I spent at least an hour trying to get google calendar to recognize ical and then many hours inputting 5 separate calendars into ical so that they would sync with google only to find out they aren't synching. I appreciate the ease of use of ical (google is stupid) but enjoy multiple people being able to look at the google calendar. Dear Google, please fix the problem(s) or don't proffer that google and ical synch. I didn't use ical last school year because it didn't synch. Super crappy programming.

Obvious flaw which is causing my original love affair with Google to become somewhat sullied. Come on Google, put out or bugger off.

This is a longstanding problem. Here is a thread from 2 years ago with the same complaint, that mentions that even then this was a recurring issue: http://groups.google.com/group/google...

In February 2009, a Google employee (Trevor Johns) noted that he had opened a feature request for manual updating, but no public progress has been made since then: http://groups.google.com/group/google...

I'm not getting any updates on the calendars updated from feeds. If only I'd know a workaround.

Ok guys, this is a workaround that I found for my purposes that helps at least people who are trying to publish their outlook calendar.
http://www.google.com/support/calenda...
This one will sync 1 way or 2 way your outlook calendar.

Now if you use other calendars in google as well, then you're going to run into the problem of the google sync being a nonprimary calendar in google, and will therefore not reflect changes in outlook when you make them in google.

The workaround for that, is to set your synced calendar as your primary google calendar. The syncing is pretty quick, and seems to work flawlessly. the only caveat, is that you have to have a machine that is running the Google Calendar Sync app all the time for the syncing to happen.

until the "Add By URL" issue is resolved, this may be a good work around for some .

here is another method that you can use as well, if you're using iCal, and want to sync with google calendar.
Now keep in mind, this is a bit of a setup, but once it's done, it works flawleslssly!

p.s: if you're not willing to revamp your calendar system, then don't continue here.

What you'll need to do is export your iCal calendars first, then create corresponding calendars in google, and import your iCal Calendars into google.

Now that this is done, you're going to go to iCal, and subscribe to your google calendars.
Here are the settings for that:
In iCal Preferences, go to the "Accounts" tab, then create a new account call MyiCalDAV (or whatever you want)
in the account information:
Description : whatever you want
Username: username@gmail.com
password: your password

Under "Server Settings" tab:
Server name: www.google.com
Server Path: /calendar/dav/username@gmail.com/user
and check : Use SSL

(replace username with your google username, leave "user" as is at the end of the line , don't replace it with anything)

Go to the "Delegation" tab:
When you account validates, you will see all the calendars in your gmail account. They will have the option to Read or Read / Write. These privileges come straight from your google calendar account.
It even works if someone has delegated to you their calendar, and given you edit privileges. Now you will even be able to edit their google calendar straight from iCal.

All of this will refresh every 5 minutes, or at whatever time interval you set when setting up the iCalDAV.

Hope this helps someone.

yes google fix this, how can we use your calender and get away say from mobile me or other things like microsoft if your stuff does not even work, it should sync in 1 min from changes from ical

jbalcorn, you are correct in your theory, however, if you're doing the syncing the other way around, while using google as your primary calendar, and iCal as the calendar, then you wouldn't have that problem, changes, and new events get published almost instantaneously.

after all, the main purpose is to have both calendars synced, right? ... so, what difference does it make, which one is the primary one that is theoretically acting as the source of events?

Jbalcorn: "The issue here is that while Google reads the changes to your iCal calendar, changes to individual events are ignored"

No, the issue is that *any* changes to an online ical calendar are not picked up by google for many hours, or even longer.

Sorry I didn't read the caveats of your original suggestion carefully. As you note this workaround does not help if you are trying to pull in a public calendar maintained by someone else.

Here's a blog I wrote with step by step on setting up a system that works. Hope this helps someone.

http://blog.foreignkid.net/2009/10/th...

I am working on a product that generates a calendar feed, so running things through Google first is not an option. I just need Google to read the feed properly so the customers can use Google Calendar.

Hoping not too many people actually use Google Calendar as their main calendar. Been 2 weeks and my feed has not updated in Google Calendar, but updated right away in iCal and Outlook.

Ancient bug is ancient. Please Google fix this major problem!

Problem still exists...
Does ANYONE know when it will be solved?
Will it be solved????

Come on, Google.