If you’re a user of QuickCal’s menu bar, you can hook in your Facebook events and birthdays into this quite easily! Facebook has nice webcal:// links which can be used to synchronize FB calendars to any calendar app (in our case, it will be iCal, which then will sync to QuickCal).

Let’s hook up birthdays first! Login to Facebook, and click “Birthdays” in the upper right side of the screen.

At the bottom of the birthday list, you’ll see a link for “Export Birthdays”. You’ll want to click on that, which will bring up a popup window with a webcal:// link in it. Copy that link, you’ll be using that soon.

Now, open up iCal. Select “Calendar” from the menu bar, then select “Subscribe”. Paste in the webcal:// link from above, and then you’ll be presented with a screen to change the name of the calendar, set the color, and more importantly to set the refresh duration. Make sure you refresh at some point or else your data will be a bit stale.

That’s it – you’re done! Confirm iCal is seeing the birthdays, then restart QuickCal to pick up the new calendar (We’ll get this addressed in a future release so you don’t have to do this), and you have your Facebook birthdays!

To hook up your Facebook event calendar, it’s nearly the same procedure. To find your “Export Events” link, you want to click on the “See All” link next to your events on your home page. The rest of the process is identical, although you probably want to set a bit more aggressive refresh time on this calendar.

Swing by the forums if you have any questions on this!

(Note: the current version of QuickCal (and iCal itself) don’t see FB birthdays as all-day events even though they last all day. We’re going to add a workaround for this in 2.4.1; until then, be sure you disable conflict detection for this calendar in QuickCal settings! Also remember that it’s iCal which is syncing to Facebook – so if you never open iCal – you’ll be looking at stale data.)