Do you find yourself routinely opening the same web page each morning to get caught up on the news and technology? I do. There are 4 or 5 sites that I open every day, first thing in the morning, without fail... Digg.com, CNet.com, apple.com, etc. Wouldn't it be great to have OS X do the work of opening your favorite web page for you? It wouldn't save a lot of time, but you have a Mac to make your life easier, not more time-consuming. iCal has just the feature for you to handle this. Yes, iCal!

The first thing we need to do is go to our web site of choice. Since I know it is updated practically every day with a new Mac Tip, I will choose this site... www.MacTipOfTheDay.com. Once I have the page open, simply drag the site icon (located to the left of the URL) over to your Desktop. The result just before you let go of your mouse will look something like this:

Doing this will create a file on your Desktop that looks like this:

Now that you have created this shortcut file, we need to open iCal. Here, we want to create a new all-day event. Do this by double-clicking in the area above the grey separator bar for any given day. You can call it whatever you want. In this case, I will call it "Open MTotD" so that I know what it is for. You will also want to set a repeat for "every day", that will end "Never". After you have done this, you will also want set the alarm type to "Open file". The file you will have it open is the new file on your Desktop. Set it to open the same day as the event at 8:00am (or whatever time you choose).

Be sure that your new event looks similar to the one below:

With this set, you will now wake up to your favorite web site, open and waiting for you!

One thing to note: if you delete the file you created on your Desktop, there will be nothing for iCal to open, so it will no longer work. If you want to keep this feature turned on long-term, but don't want to clutter up your Desktop with this file, you may want to move the file to another location before pointing to it from iCal.