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!

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!

It’s actually rather simple to get a neat icon for your website to appear on the iPhone, and it . . . → Read More: iPhone icons]]> If you own an iPhone you might have noticed that if you add a website to the home screen, some appear with neat icons and some just display a representation of the page you were on.

It’s actually rather simple to get a neat icon for your website to appear on the iPhone, and it looks great for potential customers too!

All you need to do is create an image in your favourite image editing programme, say Photoshop, Gimp, Image editor or whatever you happen to use.

You create it to the following dimensions:

width: 45px

height: 45px

Then you save it as a Portable Network Graphic (PNG) with the following name:

apple-touch-icon.png

Once you’ve done that, upload the file with FTP or any other file transfer programme to the root folder of your website. This will be called something like html or your website name.

And that’s it! When someone chooses to add your website to the home screen (in the Safari browser, click the + and select Add to Home Screen), there will be your neat icon waiting there for them! You don’t have to do anything but create your icon, the iPhone makes the corners curved and gives it the 3d effect!

I’m a hip and with-it computer internet person; running a business that is all about the web, you have to be!

Mailing lists are old favourites on the web and are based on the assumption that people like to receive email messages with information in them, be they specials you’re offering, general information . . . → Read More: mailing lists versus social networking: the new web]]> Buzzwords ahoy!

I’m a hip and with-it computer internet person; running a business that is all about the web, you have to be!

Mailing lists are old favourites on the web and are based on the assumption that people like to receive email messages with information in them, be they specials you’re offering, general information or even changes to your class timetables.

They do work, but the problem is that they need content, and content takes time to write in a single sitting. They’re also dependent upon you being able to schedule things in advance and can sometimes be a little late to market.

That’s why more and more, people online are relying on different means to convey their message quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

These alternate means are broadly described using the buzzword “social networking”.

Social networking is one of the more recent internet buzzwords and is a term used for what people do naturally anyway – talk to one-another.

The difference on the web is only the method. Rather than chatting with a phone call (arguably the first electronic social-networking) people do it with instant messengers, applications like blogger, twitter or other similar applications.

Basically, all “social networking” is about is communicating with other people, either one-on-one or as a group (one to many), but doing it electronically.

The bottom-line here though is that it’s nothing new, and nothing particularly to be confused about. Like I say, we’ve been doing this for a while now, just in different ways.

Instant Messaging

Instant Messengers are the rough equivalent of the phone call just with a keyboard typing the message rather than you saying the words yourself. Sure, you can add people to the conversation, but you can do that with a conference call can’t you? Applications like Microsoft Messenger for PC and Mac, Skype (which also does video calls, which is another subject for another time) and Adium for Mac will handle all manner of different one-to-one systems. Adium for my money is one of the nicer systems for the mac, and can handle any account, from MS Messenger, Google Messenger and others. A beta is out at the moment which handles Twitter (albeit rather oddly, but that’s what you get in beta, almost ready but still incomplete code).

You can read more about the various Instant Messaging here on Wikipedia!

Blogging and Microblogging

Blogging is effectively the diary but put online for all to see (or if you want to be cagey, you can lock things away from prying eyes. Childrens photos are a big candidate for the lock and key because, unfortunately, if you can see a photo, you can download it with a simple right click command).

Blogging has been around since the early days of the net, and some sites are still running.

Effectively blogging gives a voice to your opinions, and they’re being used for many different purposes, including simple venting to information. The movie Julie/Julia started life as a blog, then became a book before hollywood took it on.

Read more about blogging here at Wikipedia

Microblogging is ultimately the same as blogging, but with the restriction of less characters to type. Tools like Twitter have a limit of 140 characters, which has meant people who use it need to get to the point as fast as possible. As a distribution medium for additional information which can be accessed with a click of a hyperlink, it’s quite neat and there are several tools (including tinyurl)which you can use which automatically shorten your addresses – tweetdeck for the mac and Tweetr are but two of such applications, but there’s a bunch of them for all the different microblogging systems out there.

Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn

Large-scale “social networking” systems are available online for whomever wants to use them. They offer a complete ecosystem, effectively a web within a web, where people can search on your name or business, link with your profile and become a “friend”, and exchange information.

Facebook and MySpace are more for personal social networking, while LinkedIn is dedicated to so-called “professional” associations, but there’s no reason why you can’t do both using Facebook. Indeed, Facebook’s user-base is far in excess of LinkedIn and has far more features.

MySpace, even though it is said to have “lost” the Social Networking wars (and I’ll state for the record, that it’s become exceedingly boring to describe everything as a “war”) but is still used almost exclusively for musicians and bands. Arguably, the only reason Facebook won through was because their user interface (what you see on the screen) was less bad than that of MySpace.

Why use them?

The question is, why is using instant messenging, blogging and microblogging a substitute for an email?

Overall, we’re talking about distribution and speed.

With a mailing list, only the people who are members of your list can get the goodies you’re offering. This works for some marketing models, but increasingly (and aligned with the overall open dissemination of information online) are less and less effective to get your message out quickly. The Iranian elections are a perfect example of how fast information can travel with only a 140 character limit.

With some clever and regular posts to your Twitter, Facebook or your blog, you can reach far more people than with a locked-down email message. The web can be used to work for your business, indeed, it’s something overlooked by many people online: the website you have designed can work for you, not just be an online business card.

But there’s a catch: like everything online, you have to make it relevant. Your information needs to speak to your market, and to communicate information that people need to hear. This is what Search Engines use when determining where you appear in their results. It’s all about content. And hiding your content away in a locked-down email message won’t help you reach more people.

For example, the tweets (that’s the term for the messages you send using Twitter) that you’ll find at http://twitter.com/tallpoppy are almost completely dedicated to web and the technologies we’re working with. The personal twitter account is hidden from prying eyes (but as a result of the number of tweets and the subjects I write upon, draw just as many spammers as does the professional account)!

The information we post on the Tall Poppy blogs, found on our site, are dedicated to keeping our visitors up-to-date with web-related information and technology, with the once weekly status report on what we’re doing, just to prove we’re humans and not spambots!

And there’s the point of difference that you should aim at if you choose to take any of these new technologies up: make it human, make it real. By doing that you become your own representative on the web, and people like talking to people; we’re all voyers online and hearing positive stories about businesses doing great work means you’ll start to attract people you’d like to do business with.

100 essential websites

It makes for interesting reading, especially the part how Twitter has effectively steamrolled the opposition and now has become, in my opinion, the tool of choice for citizen-journalists . . . → Read More: Top 100 websites]]> Today in The Guardian online there is a report on their top 100 websites, with some analysis of the winners and losers this year:

100 essential websites

It makes for interesting reading, especially the part how Twitter has effectively steamrolled the opposition and now has become, in my opinion, the tool of choice for citizen-journalists (remember the Iranian elections?), and Google and Microsoft have cottoned-onto this and are now using Tweets in their search results which is a big change.

Here’s an opinion on Twitter and the concept of citizen journalism: rather than hindering and misinforming, slowly it will help journalism as a whole as verifiable stories will be easier to find, and nothing is better than getting information from the people on the ground.

And the more information that comes from those closest to problems that are occurring, the better things could conceivably get. Certainly you have to be cautious with information online, but if enough people speak on the same topic and convey the same information, you’ve got cause for thought and the information to act.