I freely admit to being a very organized person. I liked keeping track of things on paper in the "old" days; I carried my planner everywhere I went for a long time. Now I've moved things to my computer, but old habits die hard, and I have my new, personal web pages to help me stay sane these days. One of the features I wanted in my personal pages was a calendar, to help keep track of important dates and appointments. I wanted a calendar that looks sharp, is easy to use, and can be customized and easily edited. Just by the way, it would be nice if it didn't cost mega-bucks. Doug found the perfect calendar package for my needs.

The HTML Calendar Generator meets all of my criteria, with style. The software will generate a calendar for your webpage by creating files for the entire year, the current month, and for individual months. There is a simple FTP client that will publish the files to a server for a live web page. (At first, we thought this would be a problem, because my personal pages are not on a server; they are of course in a directory on my hard drive.) It turned out this was not an issue, because once the files are created using the generator (more about that in a minute), there is an option to "write" the files to the program's directory on the hard drive. When the files are written (which takes no time at all, I simply went to the folder, following the path provided in the generator, and moved the calendar.html file plus the files for the individaul and current months to the same folder where my personal pages files are stored. Then, I opened the page the calendar would appear on in my text editor and simply pasted an html link to the calendar.html file, saved it, and refreshed the page in my browser. No javascript to deal with, and it worked in a flash.

The Calendar Generator Screenshot: The first thing to do after you've downloaded the software is to click the Configure button. There are more than 80 configuration options to work with, and more information is availabe by choosing Configuration from the software site's main page menu. If you need to make changes after you generate your calendar, just run the generator again, make your changes, then write (or publish) the files again, and if necessary, move the files to the appropriate directory.

Cool features:

Set recurring dates (holidays, birthdays, other special events occurring on the same date each year) by clicking the Recurring tab under the configuration menu. View Screenshot.

Notice that in the screenshot of the main window of the software that, on the bottom of the main screen, a calendar for the current month appears. Double-click on any date in the calendar, and add up to ten notes and up to ten URL's for that date. This is handy for noting appointments or other important information. You can also add images to the dates by entering the image path and filename or the image filename for image files that are stored in the same folder or directory with the calnedar files.

Add additonal html for your calendar page: Screenshot. This section allows you to modify the default html that the program writes for your calendar.

Additional HTML option: This option tells the program whilch additional html option to use.

Path and name of header file / Path and name of footer file: If select the "External files instead" option then you will need to specify those external files here. Your calendar will be inserted between the header and footer files, creating one new file. Basically to use this option just create a page that looks like you want and split it into two parts at the point where you want the calendar to be inserted.

This HTML code will appear before the calendar / This HTML code will appear after the calendar: If you select the "Add HTML below to default" option then you will need to enter the HTML code you want in the appropriate boxes.

The Bottom Line:

If you need a calendar for your webpage or local personal page, you will find the HTML Calendar Generator has an attractive interface; it is easy to use, easy to customize, and best of all, it's free!