Subscribe to an RSS feed in iCal

As if RSS feeds weren't becoming pervasive enough, what with every browser and a wealth of apps that support the standard(s), Tom Henderson has put together a slick PHP script for subscribing to a feed in iCal. Not only could this make it easier for users to visualize the activity on a blog or some sort of RSS-friendly event announcement service, but it could also effectively be used as a way to archive the posts (or at least the publication dates) of your favorite blogs and news sites.

For this to work you need to have your own hosting on which you can run PHP (I believe PHP 4 and 5 both work), and you also need to install the open source MagpieRSS (simply by uploading it to your hosting space) to aid in parsing the feeds that Henerson's script downloads. Once you get MagpieRSS uploaded, you might need to edit Henderson's script to call the correct path to MagpieRSS (lines 15 and 16), but once you sort all that out, you can use a simple string like this in iCal's Subscribe dialog (Calendar > Subscribe...):

http://path/to/rss-ics.php?url=http://path/to/feed/

to kindly ask the PHP script to convert the feed you want into a properly formatted ICS file, ripe for iCal's digestion (in the screenshot above, Henderson is subscribed to his own blog, Daring Fireball and the Flickr Blog, all in their own color-coded calendars). Coincidentally, I've been looking for something like this for a while now, and once I tweaked the script to account for the location of MagpieRSS it worked like a charm for most feeds, though it seems to have trouble parsing a few. Ours, for example (tuaw.com/rss.xml) redirects to a Feedburner feed (http://feeds.tuaw.com/weblogsinc/tuaw) which this script didn't seem to grab, but it had no trouble with a clean, direct feed like Daring Fireball's (daringfireball.net/index.xml).

That said, Henderson clearly states in his blog post that this is rough around the edges yet, but he has a bunch of ideas on where to take it and is happy to discuss suggestions. If this script sounds like something useful to you, head over to Tom Henderson's announcement post and chime in on development.
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