More on Google Calendars

It turns out that Google's calendaring application has lots of very cool features. I will illustrate a few here. The main point of what I will say, however, is that if you create a calendar, there are lots of ways for it to be helpful to others, even if they don't have a Google calendar account.

1. You can create an HTML link that displays the calendar in any web browser. To see this with the District 65 calendar, click here. (You will see the actual URL after you click. You could easily send this in an e-mail message to a group.) Since the District 65 events don't start until September, click ahead to September to see dates with entries. Be sure to click on the "agenda" tab on the top right to see a list of the events in any given month.



2. You can embed a calendar in a web page. Google has a tool that writes the code to do this.
   



3. You can invite people to a specific event. You supply a list of e-mail messages and Google calendar keeps track of who responds. You can see the list by clicking on the event.



4. For a private calendar, you can decide who sees the calendar and who doesn't, who gets to edit the calendar, and even who gets to decide who sees it. (For all of this to work, everyone involved needs a google calendar account.)



5. You can synchronize Google calendar both ways with Mozilla Sunbird! The trick is to use an open-source program named GCALDaemon. This is not for the faint-hearted or the impatient, but it can be done. I will say more about this some other time.
   

The point is that good-enough shared calendaring is here now. It's easy to use and potentially very useful.