Subscribe to an external calendar

Todowl can display events that live somewhere else. A subscription is read-only by design: the events show up on your grid, they never turn into tasks, and Todowl never writes anything back to the source.

Two kinds of subscription work today: public holidays and iCal URLs.

Add a subscription

Open the calendar, find the subscriptions group in the sidebar and use Add calendar. The dialog lists every source with a short explanation of what it does.

Public holidays

Pick Holidays and choose a country. Todowl pulls that country’s public holiday list and draws each date as an all-day item.

This is the right choice if you just want national days off to show up while you are planning a week, and you do not want to hand over access to a personal calendar account.

An iCal URL

Pick URL and paste the address of an .ics feed. Give it a name so you can recognise it in the sidebar, and save.

Most calendar services can produce a public or secret .ics link for a calendar: look for wording like “secret address in iCal format”, “public URL” or “subscribe link” in the source calendar’s own sharing settings. The address has to start with http:// or https://.

What Todowl reads from the feed:

• the event summary, used as the title
• the start date, whether it is a date or a date and time
• a stable identifier, so re-reading the feed does not duplicate anything

What it does not read: repeat rules and timezone conversion. A recurring event in the source feed shows up on the dates the feed spells out, not expanded from a rule. For a holiday list or a sports fixture list, which is what these feeds usually are, that is enough.

Managing what you subscribed to

Each subscription is a row in the calendar sidebar with:

• a colour, which you can change so the layer stands apart from your projects
• an on and off switch, which hides the layer without deleting it
• a remove action

Subscriptions belong to your account, so they follow you to any device you sign in on.

What is not connected yet

The dialog also lists Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook, Exchange and CalDAV. Those routes are built into the interface but the server side is not live yet, so choosing one will not connect anything today. If you need events from one of those accounts right now, look for its iCal export link and add it as a URL subscription instead.