I have been publishing private iCal feeds to iCalx.com for years now, and have been wrangling iCal, iSync, and Google calendar to play nice over the past few weeks. I have my gCal feeds directing into iCal and thence to the phone with no difficulty, but there is no obvious way that I can see to direct public or private iCal feeds into Google Calendar as subscriptions. One may easily import to Google Calendar, but it appears to me that the ‘add calendar by address’ feature does not work as one might hope, limiting Google Calendar subscriptions to calendars hosted under Google Calendar.

This is aggravatingly counterintuitive to me, as the beauty of the iCal subscription format is clearly the ability to simply use transparent URLs.

I suppose that something happening at iCalx could be interrupting the data-pass, and that I could set up a local-file-system mirror of the .ics files such that I could keep an eye on the entire data transfer, but the reason I wanted to set this up was not to experience the joy of debugging data-piping, but to enable polymorphous data-entry on any of my primary device platforms – web, Mac, or handheld. My time budget to accomplish this, including research time, is consumed, and I’m irritated.