Cam23 2.0: Week 10, thing 18: Reflection

What I have gained from this programme so far

Rejuvenation and extension of the things I learned last year: new widgets to fit to my blog & Twitter feed, knowledge of what one actually does with a Creative Commons licence, tricks for editing screenshots.

Opportunity to measure, and reflect on, my changing way of using Delicious and bit.ly . My subjective perception had been that I was now using bit.ly in preference to Delicious. But, after counting posts from equivalent months in 2010 and 2011, I came to see that my ratio of Delicious use to bit.ly use had been roughly equal in both years, and that my use of both had declined to roughly equal degrees. A valuable corrective, as statistics often are.

The question those figures can't answer by themselves is "Why?" Yes, I know. On that I am still thinking, and maybe I'll find some hypothesis that can have statistics thrown at it.

Which thing I particularly liked or disliked

Oh I did enjoy showing off what I had found about Google Calendar! Almost as much as if I had invented it myself. And demonstrating it with LightShot & all.

Which of the forthcoming things I really can't wait to try

QR codes. I have been using them increasingly at the Haddon, picking up scraps of technique as I go along, and I look forward to reading how to handle them properly.

Cam23 2.0: Week 4, thing 8: Google calendar: an extra wheeze

Yes, I thought I'd have a bash at Thing 8 rather than the week's Extra Thing ("add library books feed to Google Reader and Google Calendar"). I installed the library widget into my i-Google page & Google calendar last year, and I don't have any adventures to report from its use.

On the other hand, I can pass on some Google Calendar information that not everyone knows: how to establish when an entry was posted to the calendar. Moreover, this gives me a chance to play with that LightShot that I last week made a hash of.

My source for the information was a contributor to Google Forum. What you do is this.

1. Click on the 'Settings' link at the left-hand side of the calendar screen (shown on the left-hand side of this blog an' all). The resulting page will include these options:


2. Click on 'Export calendars'. The click should call up a dialogue box looking something like this:

3. What's being downloaded is the ics file for the calendar, or, in the present example, the ics files of several calendars zipped together. I'm guessing that nobody who's followed me this far will need help with the next steps in opening the files. When you've opened the chosen file, you'll see miles of code looking like this:


The line "BEGIN:VEVENT" marks the start of a new calendar entry, and "END:VEVENT", unsurprisingly, marks the entry's end. What is visible between those lines is the code for the event itself. The line

CREATED:20110405T164502Z

means that the entry was created on 5 April 2011 at 16:45:02. By my watch it was 17:45, but the 'Z' at the end of the line means that the time is being shown in UTC (GMT).

You never know, you might need this information some day. From that Google Forum page you will see that I was not the first.

Thing 6: Google Calendar

I've been using a calendar, set up by my brother, on Google Calendar since the autumn of 2008, and Google became my main calendar site earlier this year. I have five different calendars on it, colour-coded to avoid confusion. (Yes, what you put on Google Calendar is calendars, so this blog post will be marked by worse-than-usual inelegance and ambiguity. Death loss of eyes/limbs.) Users may share their calendars; one of the calendars shared with me was in a colour I had used for one of my calendars, so I've had to change the colour of mine. There are 42 colours to choose from; if you ever run out of colours, it's likely that you are already trying to juggle too much.

Before Google, I used Mosuki, until Mosuki was taken down a couple of months ago. I praised Mosuki at every opportunity, as one of the most useful applications I had ever found. (Not that I found it for myself; it was another Phil Bradley recommendation, in his Update column.) Mosuki did what Google does: both have let me see my work schedule and my personal schedule all together, so there's less risk that I'll double-book myself; both have let me read and update my calendar from any web connection in the world; and both have been free!

And Mosuki had the further advantage, which I haven't yet found a way of replicating in Google: much more choice in the sharing of calendars. In Google Calendar, any calendar may be shared with other people, and different levels of sharing are available. For any individual event in the calendar, Google offers the following choice:

• default (ie details of event have the same level of sharing as the calendar as a whole)
• public (ie details are shared with the world)
• private (ie details are shared only with people designated as 'owners' of the calendar)

Mosuki allowed individual choices about the sharing of each event.

Oh, I can think of one thing Google does slightly better than Mosuki. If you opted to view an entire month in Mosuki, you lost any indication of the timing of events -- tiresome if you wanted to print a month of your schedule for view on a noticeboard. In Google Calendar's month view, the timings remain visible.

But then, in Google, the events themselves don't necessarily remain visible. Some might be occluded behind such a statement as "+5 more".

I'm getting nerdish. Even the white bits were black.