January 09, 2007
OUseful Calendar
As a New Year's resolution, I've decided to try and cut down on my date filing using scraps of paper in favour of an online calendaring solution.
The calendar I'm starting off with is Google Calendar, partly because it allows me to manage/overlay several calendars at a time, partly because it has ical and RSS/web feeds, which can be viewed in a feed reader, or Grazr widget, of course:
although it seems that these feeds present items in the reverse order in which they were added, rather than date order (today onwards, for example),* partly because it delivers embeddable HTML calendars to arbitrary web pages (including Moodle ;-), partly because there are some neat extensions (like this quick add extension from Elias Torres) and partly because Google calendar/iCal synchronisation looks likes it's on the way... (which means there'll perhaps be a subterfuge way of synching arbitrary iCal feeds with Google Calendar by going via an iCal client;-)
I know there is some internal pressure for people to start using Moodle Calendars, but I wonder if they are half way as powerful as this?
Given things like the existence of the Google Apps for Education programme, I wonder whether there is ever any internal consideration given to partnering 3rd party sites who do offer online toolsuites (e.g. I've started using Zoho increasingly since I found their toolbar synchs my MS Word docs with my online Zoho Writer account). With a student strategy that says all students should have online access, why not partner with an online office suite provider? (Just asking...;-)
Anyway - back to calendaring...
The ability to define and overlay several calendars looks like a real boon to me - for example, here's a calendar I've separated out of OUseful OU events that internal readers might find useful (I'll try to keep it up to date - so feed me those dates...;-)
Whilst looking around for other potential (internal) solutions, Marc tipped me off about a (no longer in active development?) KMi online calendar that some of the KMi folks use...
I was rather surprised that they don't use it to deliver an iCal feed of KMi seminar dates (though it would be even better if they had a Google calendar feed - not that I'm evangelising Google (agaaiiiiiinnnnn) at the moment... ;-)
* ordering Google Calendar feeds: from a forum post by DavidJaymz:
I asked in google groups about the time ordering of entries in the feed and it turns out there are some undocumented options you can tag on the end of the feed.- sortorder : valid values are "ascending" or "descending". Sorts the events in the requested order.
- singleevents : valid values are "true"or "false". Decides whether recurring events should be expanded or left as a single event. Default is "false".
- futureevents: valid values are "true" or "false". Decides whether
events in the ?past? (need to check this to see if he means past or future there) should be returned in the feed. Default is "false".So here's an example that will give you the upcoming events in ascending order:
?orderby=starttime&sortorder=ascending&futureevents=true&singleevents=true
PS another New Year's resolution was to acquire http://ouseful.info. For the foreseeable future, that URL will point to this blog (until I work out how to monetise the domain of course ;-)
Posted by ajh59 at January 9, 2007 12:29 AM