Free Online Calendar with SMS Reminders

I was thinking that I need to be a bit better organised. I've got a calendar at a free calendar place, but my lovely wife showed me the Yahoo calendar, and guess what? It kicks butt!

It's an exraordinarily flexible calendar, allowing you heaps of options for sharing your calendar out (including letting others add items to your calendar), and to send email reminders when you have an "event" (scheduled item in your calendar). The reminder feature is what interests me.

It interests me because, meanwhile, I have my hotmail account set up to send me sms messages when emails arrive (it includes a pretty decent ability to select which messages you want forwarded via sms, so you don't pay for crap to be forwarded to you!). I also use MSN Messenger for instant messaging, and as my hotmail address is my MSN Passport address, I am notified of emails by Messenger instead of by sms when I'm logged in, which saves a few dollars and is more useful when I'm at a PC.

So putting them together, by telling yahoo to use my hotmail email to send me reminders, I now have an online calendar which sends me sms messages to remind me of upcoming appointments!

Now, my lovely wife Jodie is the organiser in the family (otherwise we would be doomed). She was extremely interested in this facility, so I'm setting it up for her too. But further to this, we've now set up a private yahoo group for our family, which has its own calendar. Not only can the two of us can get to it, the kids can too (all of us are computer freaks with our own machines). This will be used to schedule in family-wide events, of which there are quite a few, because we are a one car family. Six computers, one car. We may possibly be geeks :-)

In a personal yahoo calendar, you can set it up to show group calendars and other people's shared personal calendars alongside or inline with yours. I've done this with the family calendar and Jodie's calendar, so now I see the combined view of what is going on, family wide (I can also add in the kids personal calendars if they want to make them, and if they want to give me access!). Also, the family yahoogroup can send reminders for events, which go to my hotmail account too, so I get sms alerts for not only my calendar, but for the family calendar.

Now this all sounds like we are crazy anal organisation freaks; we are anything but. The point of all this automation is that I am completely hopeless with anything that has a date attached. Jodie is better, but she has the load of the whole family to deal with. So this kind of facility is priceless to us. And it's completely free! Except for the price of the SMSs, I guess, but that's not so bad.

Anyway, I'll keep the blog posted on how this goes. It's pretty damned cool stuff. Wow, the new millenium ey?

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If you want to set this stuff up for yourself:
MyYahoo (get your calendar here)
- I advise you to steer clear of their email and toolbar.
Yahoo Groups (set up a group calendar that can send reminders to all group subscribers here)
Hotmail (set up email to sms forwarding here)
- again, steer clear of these guys for email, except for email to sms forwarding
GMail (get online email here, it's the best)
- to get an account you need an invite from an existing user. Email me and I'll send you one. It leaves the rest for dead.