We use the Google calendar on some of our sites and for clients - it is easy, can be remotely managed by various users, has an RSS feed and myriads of other options. We had an issue that seemed simple enough (displaying events in chronological or date order) but had a tough time finding help on. So here is the answer: in the feed URL, after /public/basic append ?orderby=starttime&sortorder=ascending&futureevents=true&singleevents=true
This will then order things by date (be default they display in the order entered - which doesn't make much sense to me). We use this currently in a couple of spots, like the course calendar for the Cordon Bleu cooking school of Florece, and our own Virgin Islands On Line member travel calendar. This is used in conjunction with FeedBurner (another highly recommended free service) and their BuzzBoost feature. Give it a try -

Posted on February 14, 2008 08:54 AM | Link: Displaying Google Calendar feeds in date order | Comments (0)

We really believe in leveraging third party (read FREE) tools into our projects. Google is really great at providing applications that can be integrated with websites - like their calendar. As we develop the new site for the Cordon Bleu Cooking School of Florence (old site!), we are utilizing blogger.com, feedburner.com, and the Google Calendar. One issue we had was being able to display the daily course schedule in English and Italian to end users, but to have the admin(s) only maintain one calendar.

After some searching we found a post on the Google Calendar Help group that solved our problem: you can append to the end of the iframe tag (used to embed your calendar into an html page) a language parameter that will force the calendar to display in the specified language. The code is &hl=(2 letter code) - or for example for German the code would be: &hl=de There are also some additional variables.

Continue reading "Google Calendar published in different languages" »

Posted on January 23, 2008 06:27 AM | Link: Google Calendar published in different languages | Comments (0)

I am very excited about this news - Movable Type 4.0 Beta Launches, Platform To Be Open Sourced - can't imagine how this can be anything but good news. Maybe we will finally see some e-commerce functionality and better community building tools coming out of independent MT developers now.

Posted on June 5, 2007 06:06 AM | Link: MT 4.0 | Comments (1)

Sunstone Herb Farm is a small business run by my cousins in NY state. Awhile ago we gave them some advice about their website - to name the files with the actual names of their products - like black-birch-oil.html - and to use those same names in their title tags - "Black Birch Oil". Twelve months later their business had doubled. You have to do these little things when you are setting up a site or you are wasting your time - use commons sense, use the words that accurately describe the page or item you are selling from it, and make every page title and file name unique. They have more work to do, but this was a really big improvement for very little investment.

Posted on February 26, 2007 12:09 PM | Link: Sunstone Herb Farm | Comments (0)

Sort of amazing how you have to hunt around the web to find stuff like this - Yahoo! Publisher's Guide to RSS - you would think Yahoo! and the rest of them would make it easier. Anyway, this is a good page to get started on with some general RSS tips and instructions on how to get your feed integrated with Yahoo!

Other places you need to be are Google of course, and Feedburner.

Posted on February 19, 2007 05:01 AM | Link: Yahoo! Publisher's Guide to RSS | Comments (0)

If you are running a blog (or even a website with blog software or an ability to publish RSS feeds) it is probably a good idea to publish an RSS feed. It can be a double edged sword as far as income - right now most feeds can end up delivering your content to the user stripped of your revenue generating opportunities (although that is being developed by several companies), but can also bring you new and more users since they are another way to freely distribute your content. I think it is something you at least have to try. While I don't think feeds are quite the rage they were predicted to be, they are used by tech savvy people and will probably become more common as time goes on. To validate your feed first (before submitting it around - more on that later) visit http://www.feedvalidator.org/.

Posted on February 19, 2007 04:52 AM | Link: Feed validation | Comments (0)