The calendar ALSO didn’t display anything but the one google calendar, and there were several being subscribed to.

1. get a google calendar . . . → Read More: Getting Google Calendars onto WordPress]]> The problem: Facebook events had to be manually added to google calendar, which was then added via plugin to a website I maintain.

The calendar ALSO didn’t display anything but the one google calendar, and there were several being subscribed to.

Get a google calendar account and add the events

1. get a google calendar account

2. use this procedure to link the facebook events to google calendar

Note: Don’t log out for now!

Install and configure google calendar events

1. log into your wordpress site

2. install the google calendar events widget

3. under Settings > Google Calendar Events, click Add Feed

4. add your feed title (eg. my facebook events)

5. in Google calendar, under Other Calendars, click the calendar you want to add, and in the sub-menu, click Calendar Settings

6. in the Calendar settings page, at the bottom click the XML link, and copy the text there.

7. back in your wordpress install, in the Add Feed page, into the Feed URL paste the XML link

8. Click Add Feed.

9. In the Google Calendar Events page, take note of the feed ID (it will be 1, 2 or whatever)

NOTE: repeat this process for each calendar you want to have displayed on your site.

Add the widget to your site sidebar

1. In the left sidebar, click Appearance > Widgets

2. In the Widgets page, in Available Widgets, drag and drop Google Calendar Events to your sidebar

3. In the Google Calendar Events widget, enter the ID of your feed (from the Google Calendar Events page). You can add others, separated by a comma

4. Enter the title of the widget (eg. events), and choose how you want it to display (eg. grid).

5. click save.

So you click again, and the same thing happens.

Rinse and repeat.

Some numbers don’t get recognised however – 13 numbers for example.

Thanks to Jennifer at Scriptygoodness.com, there’s a solution: it’s a hyperlink with a difference. Click to read more about . . . → Read More: making phone numbers clickable]]> On a lot of mobile phones with touch-screens (iphone, etc), you’re able to tap on a phone number on a website to dial that number.

Some numbers don’t get recognised however – 13 numbers for example.

Thanks to Jennifer at Scriptygoodness.com, there’s a solution: it’s a hyperlink with a difference. Click to read more about making phone numbers clickable!

Hope for humanity – a laptop thief returns data from a stolen PC

However, it’s not something you can count on.

Backups have become far, far easier in the 21st century — almost every external hard drive comes with easily used PC and . . . → Read More: Backup your data!]]> A report in the Melbourne Age today, is one of unexpected kindness:

Hope for humanity – a laptop thief returns data from a stolen PC

However, it’s not something you can count on.

Backups have become far, far easier in the 21st century — almost every external hard drive comes with easily used PC and Mac backup software. It’s just a case of installing the software and setting it up to run a backup once a day.

Backups save you. Seriously.

And you (should) only lose data from a stolen laptop or hard drive once in your lifetime. It’s the “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” principle, where you should learn from the mistakes of the past.

To increase your chances of saving your precious data (family photos, documents, videos of your kids growing up, important business documents, tax information, etc, etc), hard disks are SO cheap nowadays. Last I looked you could buy a terabyte (which is — more or less – one thousand gigabytes, also known scientifically as “a great big bucket of storage”) for under $150.

To put a price on important files, photos and other information of less than $150 is, to put it bluntly, a foolish approach to your life and potentially your livelyhood. The professor in the above news article was VERY lucky. Don’t count on this happening to you.

Also, if you’re running a Windows PC, please run your security updates and keep your PC virus protection up to date. The rules above apply just as much to virus protection as they do to backups! Read more about the latest PC software updates and free virus protection here.

Microsoft security fix issued

You can get it here:

Microsoft October security update – only works on Internet Explorer 6 or greater

With any microsoft computer, it’s really important to keep your security and virus protection . . . → Read More: Microsoft security and viruses]]> For all those running Windows, Microsoft has released a new security patch. Read more about it at The Age:

Microsoft security fix issued

You can get it here:

Microsoft October security update – only works on Internet Explorer 6 or greater

With any microsoft computer, it’s really important to keep your security and virus protection up to date.

You can download free virus protection for your PC here:

AVG – free virus protection for your windows PC

Just wanted to write some things about Facebook.

First, putting photos onto Facebook is really dangerous as it regularly changes security settings without telling anyone. In the . . . → Read More: Why you shouldn’t use Facebook for personal stuff]]>

I wrote this email to some friends about Facebook versus a personal password-protected website for photos and personal stuff. Thought it might be of use to others

Just wanted to write some things about Facebook.

First, putting photos onto Facebook is really dangerous as it regularly changes security settings without telling anyone. In the last 5 years, Facebook security has been regularly downgraded and people have had to make serious effort to lock their profiles down again.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline

http://flowingdata.com/2010/05/07/evolution-of-facebook-privacy-policies/ – a graphical representation of the EFF link above

The April incident where they implemented a service called “Social Graph” meant that everyone’s profiles were open to the world. The idea from Facebook was so that you could be found anywhere easily and simply, your identity could be shared with “3rd party providers” (that they had deals with) to advertise at you. Supposedly this meant you could just log in with your FB profile information and this would make things easier. In reality it meant everyone had to scramble to lock their profiles down from prying eyes.

http://geekshuiliving.com/2010/04/23/facebook-privacy-how-to-secure-your-profile-from-the-social-graph/

http://blog.backupify.com/2010/05/17/the-problem-with-facebooks-open-graph-isnt-privacy-its-security/

Further, With Facebook, you might be able to lock your profile down, but you also have to consider the profiles of your friends — if they’re not locked down as tightly as yours, or if they’ve got apps which can see their profiles then there’s a security issue there too.

Apps are a problem. Any time you use one, you’re giving free access to your entire profile to a third party. There are no guarantees what they do with this information.

Last, Facebook owns EVERYTHING you post on their site. You can’t ask for your profile to be truly removed from their servers — you can only get it turned off.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20004511-83.html

Photos are the same:

The Age, 13 October 2010 – Facebook keeps photos

The advantage you have with a website is that you can lock it completely down. No-one can see anything without the appropriate password. You own the content and you control who can go in and out. And if things go badly or something odd happens, you can take it down completely.

You can also implement a feature called “nofollow” which means the site won’t be included in search — Ultimately, however, google needs to see the site and the text on the site to index (include the site in search results) which is impossible if it’s password protected as soon as you arrive and the site won’t even display without the appropriate username and password.

The bottom line is that on the web, it being an “information superhighway”, it is actually possible to run across the road without being hit — you just have to be very wary of the way you do it, otherwise it’s all-over!

What I didn’t write about was “membership levels”. That is, where you have different fees for different levels of membership. Frankly, it didn’t occur to me until a client asked for it.

For . . . → Read More: Membership sites (part 2) – paid membership]]> I’ve already written about membership sites and the ways you can create a WordPress site in such a way.

What I didn’t write about was “membership levels”. That is, where you have different fees for different levels of membership. Frankly, it didn’t occur to me until a client asked for it.

For single-level membership…

For single-level membership, you can (if you’re patient) go with a free system, using a mixture of these plugins:

• WP-e-Commerce – the e-Commerce solution you can use to handle the transaction and send through an invitation code to your new member.
• WP-Invites – which generates an invitation code that can be sent to someone who wants to belong to your site.
• Registered Users Only - which integrates with WP-Invites and provides a field for the new member to enter the above-mentioned code.
• Peters Login Redirect – which gives you a way to redirect a new user login with a specific user role, and creates the new roles for you.
• Members Access – to set specific posts and pages to be only visible to registered users of the site

Once these are installed, you do the following:

• Create an open-ended invitation code in WP-Invites (by entering 3650 in the appropriate field).
• Generate the code.
• Add the code to a standalone text file on your computer.
• Add a new product to your WP-e-Commerce system which will, upon a successful exchange of money for membership, send out an email containing the aforementioned standalone text file to the user in question.
• Using Peters Login Redirect, you choose the landing page for users with a specific user role (in this case, let’s choose “subscriber” which is a standard WordPress user role)
• Using the WordPress Settings and General page, set New user default role to “Subscriber” and untick Membership Anyone can register.
• Using Members Access set up the pages and posts which only registered members of the site can see.

The net result is that the new user receives the text file, opens it, and creates a new user registration for themselves using the invitation code. When they login for the first time, they’re a subscriber role and are redirected to a specific landing page. Finally, they can now see the pages marked members only.

Time-consuming, yes, but free!

But what about multi-level membership?

Glad you asked. After two and a half hours of fiddling with a number of very good plugins, all of which ALMOST did the job, including the ones above, I have come to the following conclusion:

Just buy one

I’m a BIG advocate of free software, open-source and other online merriment. But this is an insoluble problem.

Of the plugins I saw, I’m going to try out the WP eMember Plugin (packaged with the Wp e-Store Plugin) for a measley $45US.

The others I saw during my travels to find the now sadly nonexistent magical membership plugin, were either too expensive or too complicated. This one looks nice and clean and (dare I say) simple.

I like simple. Especially after two and a half hours of fiddling against the odds. I feel like Nero, except without the smell of something perhaps burning in the near vicinity…