I promise not every entry on this blog will be a plug for one of the Google apps, but I recently started using the shared items feature in Google Reader. You can browse my shared items or subscribe to them in your RSS reader of choice (I hear Google Reader is nice). What you can expect from my shared items: visualizations, some design essays, pictures, and sadly, probably some lolcats.
As the title to this post suggests, you can use Google Calendar to share calendars by embedding them on your own webpage! This feature has actually existed in Calendar for a while, but this summer I worked on a new version of the embeddable calendars with fellow intern Mike Fitzgerald and our host, Michael Bolin . The new embeddable calendars use Javascript and are a lot more interactive than their HTML-only predecessors. Plus, they look a lot more like the full version of Calendar, and the agenda view has been redesigned to be (I hope!) a little more useful.
The embeddable views are used within Google Calendar to show previews of public calendars, but you can also use the Embeddable Calendar Helper to share your own calendars. The helper will generate some HTML that you can put in your own webpage to embed a calendar (or two, or more). Here is an example using public calendars for election 2008 events:
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In addition to showing the calendars, the embeddable views also make it easy for viewers to subscribe to new calendars (using the button in the bottom right hand corner). I’d love it if my classes did this for assignments so I wouldn’t have to enter everything by hand — if you’re an MIT student taking 6.UAT this term, you’re in luck . I should probably also mention that less detailed calendars for other MIT courses (lectures/recitations only) are available at wikicalendars.com . Enjoy!
School is starting next week and I’ll be back at MIT in a few days. Blogging was not one of my regular summer activities, but I’ll try to write during the school year to keep a record of my projects/research. As usual I’m wondering how summer managed to pass by so quickly, but I had a great time in New York, and at Google, too. More news on my summer project soon.
In a past life, I wanted to be a fiction writer, but for now I’ve settled for reading fiction by other people. I find it difficult to read for pleasure during the school year because my mind usually wanders off to unfinished problem sets, but I try to make up for it during the summer. Usually I really get into reading at the beach, where I am free from any sort of technology that might tempt me into reading RSS feeds instead of books. I’ve been trying to get into reading again this summer, but I think I made a mistake by starting with The Fountainhead . I like the book, but it feels heavy and slow and I haven’t been drawn into it yet. Maybe after a few more chapters?
I’m not sure how I feel about blogging, but it was suggested that I start one over the summer. I’m not sure what exactly I intend to write here, probably a mish-mash of technical things, visualization things, and personal things — or nothing at all. We’ll see.