Use Google Calendars on your website
I tend to recommend a lot of google products. One that I recommend very often is the use of Google Calendars as a calendar of events on your website. Using Google Calendars saves you having to install and configure clunky event management plugins, and fits easily onto a page on your website using a little bit of embedding code. You can even have more than one calendar display at a time and choose which ones you want displayed from a little drop-down menu. I will briefly describe how this is done and include links to the Google documentation for each step. They do a much better job of explaining than I would.
The first thing you’re going to need is a Google-ID. If you have a gmail address, you already have one. If not, go and get one. This is your single sign-on to all of Google’s services. If you are setting something up for an organization, you probably want to get a Google-ID specifically for that organization so that you can share it with others. Here are instructions on how to sign up for your Google-ID.
Now that you have your new Google-ID go log into Google Calendars. The first thing you’ll have to do is create a new calendar. This will be the calendar that you embed on your website, so give it a meaningful name like “My Organization’s Events”. Make sure you set the visibility of the calendar to public. If you skip this step, nobody else will be able to see it. Finally you are ready to embed the calendar into your website by pasting the embed code into (for example) a page in WordPress.
If you need to you can create more than one calendar and include them all in one calendar view. Just check off each of the calendars you want included in the list on the Google Calendars embedding page. If you find there are too many events in your combined calendars for the Month view, try changing to the Week or Agenda views. They are better able to display more entries in each day.
I’ve completed all of these steps in order to embed a calendar into this post that displays three Google Calendars. If you click on the little down arrow in the top right corner, you can choose which of the three calendars you’d like to see. (more…)
Preparing your images for the web
It’s become an age old question. “How do I optimize my image files so that they are small and fast loading, but still look great?” Image formats, and image optimization tools have come a long way, but there have always been just a few fundamental concepts at play here. (more…)
What RSS is and what it isn’t
I have noticed many people are confused by what happens when they click the RSS icon on their website. I think this confusion stems from people forgetting exactly what RSS is, in combination with the placement of the RSS icon in the same place as other social media icons. (more…)
5 questions to ask your web hosting provider
We’ve launched a lot of websites for our clients on a lot of different web-hosting services over the years. And we’ve often found that clients choose providers that make things unnecessarily difficult, and much more time consuming than they should be. How should you choose a host? What should you be looking for in order to get the best service? (more…)
How to submit your website to search engines
I am often asked for advice about how to submit a website to the major search engines, and what other things one can do to begin promoting a new website. Here’s a list of the submission pages of the three major search engines. Just follow the instructions on each of them to submit your site. (more…)
Higher prices on the way for Canadian telecom customers
The Canadian Telecommunications act was passed in 1993 under the Chretien/Martin government. The Supreme Court of Canada made the bill possible by taking what was once de-facto regulatory purview of the provinces and decreeing it to be federal jurisdiction. The act was rolled into the mandate of the CRTC — a regulatory body which saw its origins with the Railway Act of the 1850s, under which the Canadian government sought to control telegraph lines, usually raised along railroads.
As a result of this power grab, and specifically section 16 of the act, Canada missed out, in a big way, on the telecommunications renaissance that was to be born of the rest of the 90s. Section 16 states that no telecommunications company could operate in Canada unless it was Canadian owned and its board was under nearly total Canadian control.
Until the 90s, most of the country’s telecommunication services were provided by provincial monopoly players. Something that would soon change with the rise of the internet and the mainstreaming of mobile phones.
While the rest of the world was seeing new telecommunications companies take root and offer internet and mobile services at affordable prices to everyone from the rich of the developed world to the poor of the developing world, Canada saw its already bloated and stagnant telecom oligopoly get fatter and lazier, doing its worst to keep up with new innovations, all the while charging a monopoly price for its services.
Sadly this has come to a climax in recent weeks. (more…)
Are you a hard money fanatic?
As an Exercise in graphing on the web, I’ve setup a little page which aggregates the precious metal prices from the Vancouver Bullion & Currency Exchange. I’ve got a little curl script that scrapes the prices off of the VBCE Gold prices webpage and records them on an hourly basis. From there I use a php graphing system to create graphs of the data as collected. I’ve also included a line for the spot price which I scrape hourly form XE.com (don’t tell on me!)
You can see the graphs here: http://gold.brainbits.ca
Cheers, and ¡Viva la revolution!
Free Online Portfolio Services
Just the other day, I was asked by a friend whether I could suggest a way for her to easily show her design portfolio on the web. I’ve been asked this before, and have since taken some time to research portfolio website services so that when I’m asked again, I’ll be armed with a good answer.
It turns out there are a lot of these kinds of services. It’s the kind of thing that makes a web developer think ‘why didn’t I think of making this?’ so it’s quite natural that several have thought of it. I put several of these services through their paces putting together a simple portfolio site of my own with just a couple of projects and some bio and contact information. Following are outlines of a few of my favorites free online porfolio services.
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