Friday 11 June 2010

Thing 6: "When my cue comes, call me"

Photograph of the Saxon mass-clock on the south wall of Escombe Saxon church, near Bishop Auckland, County Durham. My photograph, April 2009.
In the interests of testing out your Google Calendar skills, you are all invited to add the concert advertised yonder --> to your Google Calendars. And once it's in your calendar you'll all come to the concert, right?

[ETA: For those reading in a reader, the sidebar information is as follows:

Friday 25 June, 8pm, West Road Concert Hall, Click for more information
]

[Further edited to add that there are instructions for doing this in the comments]

There are several very useful things about Google calendar (here comes another list, because I like lists very much):

1. You can see several different colour-coded calendars all in one view, making it easy to see what's a work event, what's a test match (for those of us left unmoved by this impending World Cup doodah), what's a social engagement, and what's the radio programme you can't bear to miss (although maybe that's redundant calendar use in the iPlayer world).

2. Google will remind you when your event is about to happen via pop-up message, email or text message/SMS.  So there's no excuse for forgetting.  Unless you're logged out of Google, with your phone switched off, and not checking your email.  It could never happen!

3. Being able to share a whole calendar between people, so that a whole group of people can see what's going on.  That's something we could really do with here, but it's likely that imperfect take-up would only make the current problem of multiple diaries worse, and not better.

4. Publicising a single event with a Google Calendar link, so that people can add it to their own calendars easily (have you added my concert yet?).

5. Being able to embed calendars into websites is surely an extremely useful tool for any organisation that has opening hours.  My own undergraduate days were spent squinting at the Pendlebury Library calendar trying to work out if this was a closing-for-lunch or a closing-at-lunchtime day: it would have been so much easier if a widget had just told me what was what!  Equally, it could be useful for clubs, societies, sports teams, orchestras...

However, is Google Calendar for me? Probably not. Why not? Because I don't have one of these new-fangled smart phones (is that even the right name for them?), and I often need to make and check plans when I'm out of touch with the internet. So a paper diary and a stub of pencil tucked into my bag are still the best solution. And you can keep all sorts of useful scraps of paper, billet-doux, photos, poems, etc. in the back of a paper diary. Now someone's going to tell me that there's GoogleZettel, and I'll really have to give in to Google taking over everything I do...

6 comments:

  1. Thanks for the link! Afraid I work Friday nights so won't be at the concert - you might like to add the info inside your posts for those of us that use Reader.

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  2. Good point about Reader - I've edited the post. I don't really expect all the librarians of Cambridge to come to the concert, but 'every little helps', as they say, with publicity!

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  3. Like the link to calender - if you have an event to advertise - what do you need to do to get the button to use?

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  4. Chris, to get the button to add to a webpage:

    1) Go to the 'edit event details' page of the event you're advertising

    2) Make sure that the event privacy is set to 'public' (on the right-hand send of the page)

    3) If it wasn't already public, set it to public and hit save.

    4) Just below the privacy settings is a link to 'publish this event'. Click on it, and copy the text in the new window into the webpage you want to advertise on.

    Bingo! Job done.

    Optional extra - to have a slightly different button image to the standard, I found this page - http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/event_publisher_guide.html - and used the images from there (if you create a dummy button using the form there, you can read through the code to find the image name, and replace the image name in the code generated above).

    I hope this makes sense. If not, please say, and I'll write a full post with screenshots for the steps.

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  5. Can I just say, I'm loving your tags - especially 'outraged of Cambridge' and 'when I was young' :) Also loving the #regionaltagging discussion over on Twitter ... Yes, I know, I am tag-obsessed :D

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  6. @librariangoddess - thanks, it's nice to know they're noticed. I'm pretty keen on tags myself, which is why my thing 8 is taking so long to write. There's another tag to look out for on my next (thing 7) post, too, if I ever write it...

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