Syncing your iPhone/iPod Touch to iCal via Google Calendars

Here at Drum, we keep track of all of our meetings and time sheets through iCal and Google Calendars. Since most of us have iPhones or iPod touches, we wanted to sync our hand-held devices with these calendars as well. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to set up your calendars and then sync them to iCal and your iPhone/iPod Touch using Google Calendars.

A few things to know before you start:

• You have to be running software version 3.0 on your iPhone/iPod Touch
• You will need a Gmail account, click here to get one
• You can only set one Google Calendar (the default one) per email address to sync. This may change in the future, but it’s only one for now.

First off, you’ll need to create a calendar in Google Calendars. Click here to head over to Google Calendars and go ahead and login,

1. Once you’re in the calendar view, click on “Settings” in the top right of the page
2. Navigate to the Calendars tab in the yellow box
3. Hit the brown “Create a New Calendar” button

Open up the Settings on your iPhone/iPod Touch and navigate to the Mail, Contacts and Calendars settings. Tap on “Add Account” and then tap on “Other.” From there, tap on “Add CalDAV Account” under the Calendars heading. Enter the information as follows:

• Server: google.com
• Username and Password from your Google account
• Description: what you want to call the calendar

Click “Next” and it will verify your account information. Your hand-held should now be synced to Google. Now we have to link up Google to your iCal. You can set this up manually, but there’s this great little application called Calaboration that does the dirty work for you.

Make sure iCal is closed, then download Calaboration and launch it. A window will come up asking for a login – enter the email address and password for your Google account. From here, you’ll be presented with a list of which calendars to add to iCal. Select the calendar you’d like to add, click “Add to iCal” and then you should be all set, with any updates to iCal being reflected to your iPhone/iPod Touch and vice versa.

GreenvilleRec site launch

We are excited to announce the launch of the new GreenvilleRec.com website this morning. Some of the features of the new site include a park locator, a Twitter feed displaying field closings and conditions, targeted zones for advertising, multiple templates that compliment the look of several parks and an overall dynamic structure. At the time of the launch, the website weighs in at right around 260 pages. With a content-managed back end, we expect that number to continue to grow.

With the improvements in usability, design and the dynamic nature of the site, we expect that GreenvilleRec.com will see 1 million visits this year.