Presdo has had a busy summer and you can learn about some of the advances they've made to the service at the Presdo Blog. I have not been using the service much, but I've now added the Firefox Extension that lets me add events directly from GMail and other sites. It "adds a simple “Create a Presdo Event” button next to Gmail’s Reply and Forward buttons, so that when it comes time to organize that get together as a result of an email thread, one click is all it takes to start the planning process."
Presdo may be helpful in setting up the time for a meeting or event, but for tracking and publishing events, I am using Google Calendar. I use it to track both my personal calendar and a variety of church events calendars. I also link-in my Pittsburgh Steelers and Pittsburgh Penguins calendars! When everything is working smoothly, my Google Calendar synchronizes with my Palm Desktop and my Palm handheld using a program called CompanionLink for Google Calendar.
The primary reason that I like using Google Calendar as my central calendar is that I can get to it in a variety of ways and display the events in a variety of ways. It also basically eliminates the process of keeping up the church website calendar because that is the same as my calendar.
Using Google Calendar in other websites allows you to have an automagically updating calendar that always shows the right day at the top. Go into your Google Calendar, under the My Calendars box, click the arrow on the right next to one of your calendars and choose Calendar settings. Scroll down to Embed this Calendar and you'll see a box of HTML that you can put into any website. Click the Customize link and you can embed multiple calendars (color-coded) or change the way that a calendar is displayed.
Users can then subscribe to your calendars with iCal, their own Google Calendar, or even the new Yahoo Calendar. To see how it works, visit one or both of the sites below:
- My church home page, which shows a calendar including three types of events.
- My confirmation home page, which uses the same calendar as the home page, but just shows events relating to confirmation.
The tabs are all live, so while I pick the default view, visitors to these pages can change what they see. These calendars are also shared with my office staff, so they can make additions or corrections as well. I can even add something to my Palm and, after the synchronization is complete, it will show up on the website.
If there is interest, I'll walk through some of the steps that I've sort of glossed over above. Please post a comment on the Tech Geek Blog or send me an e-mail.
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