Ben Stewart

Calendar syncing is an issue for anyone who works on a team, has multiple computers, or even just has a computer and a phone. It seems like it should be easy to keep appointments and events in sync among all of your devices, but so far there hasn’t been one solid solution to rise to the top of this market and woo the masses. However, that doesn’t mean the calendar syncing landscape is barren. There are a lot of good solutions available that each solve one piece of the puzzle. By putting the right pieces together anyone can create their taylor-made calendar syncing masterpiece. When I started looking for a solution I wanted something that would:  

• Sync multiple iCal calendars from my Mac with multiple Google calendars (belonging to multiple Gmail and Google Apps accounts).
• Allow others to subscribe to any of my calendars (if I give them permission).
• Two-way sync over the air with my iPhone (I’m too lazy to have to plug in my iPhone every day).
• Not cost too much money.

I already used Google Calendars for different parts of my personal and professional life with different Gmail and Google Apps accounts. Another option would have been to use MobileMe, but I prefer Google Calendar because of its feature set and price point–free. One of Google Calendar’s great features is the ability to share calendars with other Google Calendar users. The first thing I did to get setup with a good syncing solution was to choose one Gmail account to have complete control over all of my Google Calendars. This same feature also lets me share calendars with other people allowing them to see the information but not make any changes to it.

Now that I had everything in Google under one account I just needed to find a way to sync that account with iCal on my Mac. There are a few options out there that do this, but the one I prefer is SpanningSync.

Some people don’t like the fact that all information runs through SpanningSync’s servers (as a privacy issue), but I actually like the fact that they operate as a service because they notice when things break and are very quick to respond. Also, I don’t really mind my calendar data passing through SpanningSync on its way to Google–if my data were too sensitive for SpanningSync I wouldn’t be sending it to Google in the fist place.

SpanningSync allows one Google account (Gmail or Google Apps) to sync any of its calendars with any calendars in iCal. It runs as a preference pane and includes a little menubar icon to show you when a sync is in process or if there has been a sync error. SpanningSync is a service so it is not free. But you get continuous support for that fee. Users choose to either pay an annual fee of $25 the first year then $15 each year after that, or a one-time fee of $65.

With my Mac and “the cloud” all synced up I just needed to throw my iPhone into the mix. The first solution I tried was the standard iCal sync via iTunes. This solution was quickly thrown out for a couple of reasons. First of all, the note field. For one of my jobs I use the note field in iCal to contain long lists of information about each event that I create. This fields syncs perfectly up to Google so I can view all of these notes online. However, for some reason iTunes cuts off the note field when it syncs iCal events to the iPhone. Since this information is critical to my job, I cannot use iTunes calendar syncing for my calendars.

Besides, who wants to have to use a cable to sync your phone and your computer these days anyway?!

So I started looking into alternate solutions for iCal/iPhone/Google Calendar syncing and I found Saisuke. Saisuke is a calendar replacement app on the iPhone. So, instead of opening the default calendar app on my phone I now open Saisuke instead. I first tried the free version of the app which is limited to 1-way sync (Google to iPhone only), 1 calendar only, and a shorter sync period. Once I felt comfortable with this solution I went ahead and paid for the full version ($9.99).

With Saisuke my iPhone and Google Calendars are always in sync. With SpanningSync my iCal and Google Calendars are always in sync. The total calendar sync cost of this solution: $65 + $9.99 = $74.99 (less than one year of MobileMe). Of course, MobileMe offers a lot of other features for that fee, but they are features I didn’t need so this solution was the one for me.

How do you keep your schedules in sync?

When I first started to jump into the world of standards-based web design one of the guys I followed online was The Man in Blue (Cameron Adams). Aside from being a Javascript ninja, apparently he’s also a music video master… geek style. Here is a recent post of his with a link to the geek-chic video he made of his dock:

Russ asked what my dock looked like, so I made a 55 second video. (Turn your sound on)

Back in part 1 I listed five of the plugins I install every time I setup a WordPress blog for a friend or client. Here are five more plugins for WordPress that are sure help you get the most out of your blogging experience.

1. Cimy Swift SMTP. I often use a Gmail account as the primary e-mail account for a blog or website. However, what about emails that are sent automatically by WordPress like user registrations, comment notifications, etc.? Many web hosts will automatically try to send those from their own mail servers instead of Gmail’s servers. With the Cimy Swift SMTP plugin all of your website’s emails will run through whatever servers you assign.
2. Dagon Design Form Mailer or CFormsII. These plugins are both excellent ways to setup a contact form (or any other type of form) on your website. I started off using the Dagon plugin but have recently moved over to CForms. I think it’s a bit easier to manage.
3. Lightbox 2 (2.8.2) and Add Lightbox. These plugins add the “lightbox” effect to any images you link to in your posts (like the WordPress logo linked at the top of this post). The first plugin adds the necessary javascript to your theme and the second plugin automatically adds the necessary HTML to each linked image.
4. Events. Need a simple plugin that lists upcoming events in the sidebar and/or an Events page? This is one of the easiest I have found that still allows adequate control over the structure and style of the events listings.
5. WordPress.com Stats, Google Analytics for WordPress, µMint Plugin. None of these plugins actually track stats themselves, but all of them integrate whatever stat tracking service you prefer into your WordPress site. WordPress.com Stats even adds a nice graph and some fun info. about popular posts to your WordPress dashboard. I generally install WordPress.com Stats and another tracking system (either Google Analygics which is free or Mint Stats which is pretty) so I can compare results. Just like Askimet, WordPress.com Stats requires you to sign up for a free WordPress.com account. You don’t have to start a blog there, you just need an account. For real-time tracking of people viewing your site you can also check out Wassup.

That wraps up this round of excellent WordPress plugins. Are there plugins you just can’t live without? Post a link in the comments and be sure to stick around for part 3.

I like to see how people end up here at my website. Most of the time the search terms people use to get here are pretty normal. However, sometimes they are kind of obscure. Today I saw a search term that landed someone on this post that was descriptive enough for me to guess the problem they were having that prompted their Google quest. I know because it’s a problem I have had as well.

The search term was “dropbox iphone bring back simple view” and I assume the problem was that they were surfing the Dropbox website on their iPhone and they switched from the iPhone-optimized view to Dropbox’s “standard view.” I love that so many sites give you this option because sometimes they strip out necessary features when designing an iPhone-optimized view. It is nice to be able to switch back-and-forth, except that in the case of Dropbox you can only go one direction. Once in the normal view there is no link to switch to the iPhone-optimized view.

Before I show you the solution on this one, let me say first that I submitted feedback to Dropbox about this after it happened to me and very quickly received a response saying:

Hello Ben,

I will pass your feedback about the iPhone issue long to the team.

We are always working on improving our service and adding new features and functionality so please keep using Dropbox and let us know if there are any other suggestions!

If there is anything else we can do to help just let us know!

Best,
David D

You have to respect a company with customer service like this. Now on to the solution. Simply point your mobile Safari window to the following URL: http://getdropbox.com/iphone

While it isn’t quite as good as a link back to the iphone version, it does do the trick and it’s super easy. Happy Dropboxing!

I really like WordPress. If you are looking for a blog/news-based website then there is probably no better option than to use WordPress. One of the things that puts WordPress at the top of my list is the thriving community of developers that use it. If you need your new website to do something then there is a good chance that someone else has already developed a plugin to accomplish that task… and it’s probably free. The only problem with such a vast community is that there are so many plugins to search through that it is sometimes hard to find the best plugins to meet your needs. No fear, I have compiled a list of some of my favorite plugins for WordPress to accomplish several common tasks in website development.

1. Akismet. Use this! There is no better way to eliminate a large percentage of comment spam. While it isn’t a 100% solution, it makes a huge difference and it comes pre-packaged with WordPress. All you have to do is activate the plugin and then sign up for a free WordPress.com account–you don’t have to start a blog there, just an account. After signing up for your account just go to your new profile page and copy/paste the “API Key” that you will find at the top of the page into the Akismet settings page on your blog.
2. Viper’s Video Quicktags. This plugin adds a row of buttons on the WordPress “write” screen so you can easily embed videos from many common video services like YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Google Video, etc. You can even choose which services to show or hide and set standard sizes for your embeded videos.
3. All in One SEO Pack. Every website is better with good search engine optimization (SEO). This plugin helps to automate that process by automatically changing your website’s title, description, keywords, and more to values that help search engines catalog your website accurately based on its content. This is a “set it and forget it” kind of plugin worth the download.
4. WP Super Cache. WordPress, like most blogging engines and content management systems, generates dynamic pages. That means that every time someone goes to a page of your site, WordPress finds the content for that page in its database and creates the right HTML page on the fly. It’s pretty much magic. But, it can also be slow if you get a lot of people viewing your site at the same time, if you are on a shared hosting package, or if your theme has a lot of extra database calls. Don’t fret, there are things you can do to help speed up your blog and one of those is caching. Basically, this plugin saves those HTML files and instead of asking WordPress to generate new ones every time someone visits a page, it pulls out the already-generated file and displays it instead. This will not only make your visitors happy, but your web hosting service will thank you.
5. Feedburner Feedsmith or FD Feedburner Plugin. Either one is good, but the most important thing is to use Feedburner to manage your feeds! Why? First of all, if you change the location of your website or the platform you are using to run your website your original RSS feed address will more than likely change. This means that anyone who is subscribed to your feed using that address will now get nothing. The only solution at that point is to post a link to your new feed and hope that most of your readers will subscribe to your new feed. However, if you are using Feedburner then all of those readers are subscribed to a feed at Feedburner’s address which doesn’t change. All you have to do is tell Feedburner to start getting its contents from the new location and you don’t loose a single reader. As if that weren’t enough, Feedburner will also help clean up any improperly formed feeds which can be especially useful for podcasters.

That’s a pretty good first five to get you started. I’ve got Part 2 just around the corner so stay tuned. But until then, what plugins do you use that you want to tell the world about?

One of the major search results that bring people to my corner of the interwebs is “PRK recovery.” While that is far from what this blog is generally about, that is something that I blogged about when my wife had PRK surgery about a year ago. I still remember all of the emotions that happened leading up to the procedure and especially during the longer-than-expected recovery time. We wondered if we had made a huge mistake–if she was going to recover or if her practically blind condition was going to be permanent. We searched the web for anyone else’s experience to compare notes and hopefully get some kind of reassurance that things might just turn out OK.

Well, it’s been a long time since my last update on Rebekah’s PRK eye surgery and that is because we haven’t really had to think about it in a long time. Rebekah still doesn’t have 20/20 vision (I think it’s about 20/25) but it is definitely good enough for her to feel good about having the procedure. As I said, it was a long and painful recovery process (much harder than we expected), but it ended up being well worth the time and pain. She still uses eye drops daily (usually in the morning but sometimes in the evening as well), but the dryness has been the only real side-effect. Overall it has been much better than the days when she had to wear hard contact lenses or glasses… although I do kind of miss how she looks in glasses.

(Maybe that wasn’t the best picture to post publicly.)

You can read the rest of the recovery saga here:

• Week of Procedures
• PRK Recovery Update
• Another PRK Recovery Update

This morning I had a great discussion with a couple of friends about time management. One of the things we did together was a figure out whether or not each of us is addicted to urgency. If you’re like me you are asking yourself what “addicted to urgency” means. I mean, I’ve seen my fair share of Intervention episodes but I have never even thought about someone being addicted to urgency. However, after our conversation and a little contemplation I think this might be a real problem in our society–and especially in church leadership.

So what are the qualities of an urgency addict?

Here are a few questions to get you started on figuring out whether you might struggle with this issue of urgency. (Please note: these questions are not intended to deliver any kind of diagnosis but are provided merely for introspection.)

• Do you feel like you do your best work under pressure?
• Do you enjoy–and look forward to–the rush of adrenaline that you get when working with short deadlines or crisis situations?
• Do you keep thinking that someday you will be able to do what you really want?
• Do you find yourself giving up quality time with important people in your life to handle crisis situations at work?
• While working, do you feel the pressure of all the other things you have to do that are hanging over your head?

If some of those resonate with you a little more than they should, you might want to take this Urgency Index quiz and start to analyze your workflow to see if this is a problem in your life. A lot of this discussion was based on thoughts in Stephen Covey‘s book First Things First, so you might even consider picking up a copy of that, for further study.

While urgency addiction may truly be an important issue, this conversation doesn’t stop there. It is actually only the beginning of a greater conversation about how we prioritize lives and what we consider “normal.”

Let’s take a step back from this specific issue and look at other things in our society that we let creep into our lives. Anne Jackson just posted some great thoughts about things that we often put in the forefront of our lives without even realizing how much they impact how we live. More importantly she asks how often we fail to take those issues seriously. How is it that we determine which addictions or distractions are serious and which are joke-worthy?

Not to over-spiritualize the situation here, but ultimately any addiction is a form of idolatry, right? An addicted person is misaligning his priorities and focusing too much on something that is ultimately trivial instead of focusing on things that are truly important. I don’t bring this up as a condemnation of addicts or to cause anyone struggling with addiction to feel guilty, but rather to compare the things that our society (and the Church) views as serious problems to the things those same people view as normal behavior.

Take, for example, the “Baptist potluck.” I have traveled to many churches over the past few years and taken part in many potluck meals. Almost every time I left the table more full than I should have been–sometimes even with some joking comment about gluttony. (If we joke about it then it’s not true, right?) Christians even have jokes about eating too much at church like “What’s another name for a Baptist preacher’s belt? A fence around a chicken graveyard.” But I wonder how many people have serious issues with overeating that are swept under the rug with humor instead or being discussed with the same seriousness as alcoholism or pornography.

How many church leaders (both paid and volunteer) are workaholics? Is this behavior any less destructive for them and their families than any other addiction? Is the Church doing a great disservice to its leaders and its members by brushing off certain issues as normal behavior instead of challenging and correcting them? How can we focus on things that are ultimately important instead of being distracted by things that end up being trivial?

Failure is being excellent at something that is ultimately not important.

I love TextEdit. For those who aren’t familiar with TextEdit, it is essentially Apple’s version of Microsoft’s Notepad (or more accurately WordPad). With Quicksilver installed I am only one quick keystroke away from having a new document open and ready to receive whatever information I need to throw at it–a phone number, a quick list, whatever. Combine this with Dropbox and those files are now accessible from anywhere–even my iPhone! Sound too good to be true? It is. Amazingly, the iPhone won’t read TextEdit documents. But don’t fret, this story has a happy ending that is sure to up your productivity and mobility.

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