Friday, May 25, 2007

Building a Web Tool

I spent some time today working on a new tool/service/product that I can offer to my clients. Many of them have a need to display a list of upcoming events, whether it's classes, exhibits, concerts, or annual meetings, they need to present that information to their website visitors. The trick is that this information changes on a regular basis and many of them have better things to do than figure out the relevant HTML code to make the changes themselves.

Enter my little piece of code. I don't really have a name for it yet, but for now we'll call it the Calendar Reader.

After installing the Calendar Reader, the website owner can maintain the upcoming events using Google Calendar. Any changes they make in the Google Calendar will immediately show up on their website. Pretty neat, huh?

The code is still a bit primitive and still requires the skills of a web programmer to install and customize. Once in place, though, anyone who can handle the Google Calendar interface can maintain their own list of events.

So, do you use Google Calendar?

1 comment:

Spencer said...

Yes, I've been using it for just over a year. The first entry on my Google calendar is May 5, 2006. I'm currently aggregating 8 calendars into the display -- 5 are family related, one church related, and 2 google-provided.

I also recently found a plugin for Thunderbird that integrates my Google calendar. When an email comes in with a "vcs" attachment, it offers to add the event to my calendar, and I can view the calendar from within Thunderbird.