A Web calendar is an online tool for keeping yourself or others abreast of upcoming events, dates, appointments, deadlines, or special occasions. Anything time-dependent can be entered into a Web calendar. It can be used for personal purposes or for organizations, businesses, Intranet's or webmasters.

To take advantage of web calendars you will need a either a web based reader or a web cal application - software that keeps abreast of information from sites in which you are interested, and allows you to see at a glance what's new.

Telling your web cal application to watch a feed is called subscribing (see below for details). For most web cal feeds this is free, and doesn't require telling the site anything about yourself.

Some modern browsers support web calendars without additional software. These include Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista, Apple's Safari on Mac OSX.

All other browsers will require the installation of web calendar software so that when you click the subscribe button your browser will know there is an application associated with the .ics extension (internet calendar standard)

Installing a web calendar application is straight forward although if you using Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista or Apple's Safari on Mac OSX there is no need for additional software.

There are of course plenty of applications that you can purchase to read web based calendars, and a number of free ones as well.

Google - you will need a google account, they offer a free web calendar.

Sunbird - is a freely downloadable application provided by Mozilla the people that make Firefox.

Yagoon - another excellent free application is Yagoon Time.

How you subscribe depends on which browser you favour:

Internet Explorer 7

On the Vista platform it will automatically associate the web calendar file.

On XP platform you will need to install a web cal application, then the association is automatic.

Internet Explorer 6

On all OS's you will need to install a web cal application, then the association is automatic.

When you subscribe to the Wessex Research Calendar feed you will see a pop up box similar to the one below. At this point you can decided on the time frame for updates daily, weekly, monthly. You will now be able to view all diary dates from the group calendar without having to revisit the website.

Copy and paste the following: or view other feed options.

webcal://www.wessexresearchgroup.org/calendar/phpicalendar/calendars/WRG_Calendar.ics