schedule posts

If you're someone who has to take a lot of meetings, you've undoubtedly run into scheduling issues at some point and had to reschedule one . Google Calendar just added a new feature that you can enable in Labs to make the process a lot easier (if your company uses Google Calendar). Smart Rescheduler looks at other Google Calendars that have been shared with you and creates a ranked list of the best times to reschedule.

It's a great idea in theory -- it even deals with room conflicts! -- but what works for the Google Calendar team might not work for everyone. As you might expect, they all use Google Calendar. However, if the people you're meeting with are on some other calendar software, Smart Rescheduler won't have enough data to do its job. I really like the concept, though, and it adds to a growing stack of reasons to get on board with Google Calendar.

Twuffer is a site that lets you keep a buffer of Twitter posts that will go up at times you schedule. Twitter plus buffer equals Twuffer, get it? In theory, this is a pretty good idea if you're someone who needs to make periodic announcements or post reminders at intervals. The thing is, I don't think the majority of Twitter users could do that without being annoying.

Twitter is starting to become more mainstream now, but the biggest complaint people have about companies and celebrities starting to use the service is that they come of as inhuman. Pre-writing your tweets only makes you seem more mechanical. Twuffer could be excellent if you use it on an account that only you follow, to post reminders to yourself. There are already services that do this, but Twuffer might be faster to set up.

I could be completely underestimating this service, though. The site suggests a few ways to use Twuffer, but if you have an idea about how it could be effective on someone's main account, let me know in the comments.

All of us could use a personal assistant every now and then, especially when it comes to planning your itinerary for a trip where you have to put together reservations for restaurants, entertainment, and rental cars into something you can follow once you reach your destination.

TripIt is a site designed to take confusion out of trying to organize all your reservations by doing it for you. The service takes all the plans you've made for your trip such as plane reservations, rental cars, and restaurant reservations and organizes them, adding important things like directions to get to where you're going and a projected weather forecast for your trip. Your TripIt itinerary can then be printed out and taken with you as well as forwarded to friends in email, synced with your personal calender, or viewed on your mobile device.

TripIt allows you to add information to your trips manually or if you schedule events with one of TripIts supported websites you can just forward your reservations to the site via email and have them added to your itinerary for you. Currently TripIt supports a slew of airline websites, restaurant reservations through OpenTable.com, and they just added support for a variety of event sites such as Ticketmaster.

While Google's Blogger service offers just a fraction of the features you'll find from a more robust blog client like WordPress, it looks like Google is playing catch up. Just the other day we reminded you that you can check out draft.blogger.com for a variety of beta features and widgets that aren't available via the regular Blogger site. And now it looks like Google has added a feature do Blogger in Draft that it should have had years ago: the ability to schedule posts.

Previously, once you hit the publish button in Blogger, your post would go live. Even if you set the date for tomorrow or next year, a post would still go live as soon as you hit publish. This comes in handy if you want an easy way to pin a post to the top or bottom of the page (just set the date for the year 3017 or 1999). But if you plan on taking a vacation and you want to schedule a new post every day while you're out, you've had to resort to third party services, like writing blog posts via email and using an email scheduler like LetterMeLater.

But now if you use the Blogger in Draft page, you can schedule posts just by setting the time for a future date and then clicking Publish. A message should pop up telling you that your post is now scheduled. Keep in mind, this only works if you write your posts using draft.blogger.com. If you use the main Blogger page, posts will go live as soon as you hit publish.

[via Google Operating System]

Most blogging tools and web-based dashboards don't offer much in the way of graphically viewing your post schedule. You typically get a list of your posts that you can search and order by date, but that's about it. If you're blogging on WordPress and would like a more graphical view of your posts that should play well with just about any calendar app you're using, this iCal-Posts plug-in by Gary King might be just the thing you're looking for. Offering a zero-config setup, you simply upload King's plug-in to your WordPress plug-in directory and activate, then add '?ical' to the end of your URL (i.e. - downloadsquad.com/?ical). In our tests, this causes most browsers to download a .ICS file which was immediately opened by iCal on Mac OS X. Adding the URL to web calendars like Google Calendar also worked perfectly. If you would prefer to follow only a specific category in your calendar, you can tweak the URL by adding '&category=' (i.e. - downloadsquad.com/?ical&category=blogging).

Gary King provides his iCal-Posts plug-in for free from his site.

Tired of staring at the dry erase board on the fridge reminding you to take out the trash? Sure, you could sign up for a useful online service to help you and your roommates/family remember whose turn it is to pay the bills. Or you could try to make a game out of it.

Chore Wars takes the latter approach and almost kind of sort of succeeds. The web service is designed to resemble a multiplayer role-playing game. You can create characters, join guilds and go on adventures. But while the way to "level up" in most games is by performing repetitive tasks like slaying monsters, in Chore Wars you perform repetitive tasks like washing dishes.

Every time you complete a real world task, you can sign in to Chore Wars to check it off a list. You'll be rewarded with gold and experience points. Of course, both of these are meaningless in the real world. In fact, when you set up the tasks, or "adventures," you can select how large the reward should be for each activity.

You can also create monsters and treasures that you might encounter each time you complete a task. If, for example, you run across a rat when taking out the trash, you can read the blow by blow description of the battle you've had, although you have no control over it. Like some Greek hero (Sisyphus perhaps), if you die you get a little gold and experience anyway and have to take out the trash again tomorrow.

Is Chore Wars going to make you or your kid any more likely to make your bed or vacuum the house? Probably not. But we've seen your house, and we're going to root for any service that might prompt you to clean it up.

[via WebWare]

Forget about pen and paper, its all about family scheduling online with Chore Buster. This online application still isn't going to work any magic, or ensure the kids clean up their mess, but it will help you to stay a little more organized.

Signing up with Chore Buster is free, and ad supported. Schedules are emailed out weekly, complete with how often chores have to be done, and how hard they are to complete. It's a great tool to use for the entire family to ensure that things get done, and fair chore allocations are divided.

Another great family chore tool is Cozi. This downloadable application created by a few ex-Microsoft employees helps create family schedules.

[via ehub]

Google has now made it possible to send updates to Calendars using SMS. The request to do so came in on the Google tip lines. People wanted a way in which to send text messages to add events, or a way to find out which events they had coming up.

The SMS updates work by sending a text message to 'GVENT' (48368) , with some details about the event, (ie. Starbucks meeting at 2pm). The GVENT will them be added to the users calendar immediately, and a text message confirming the details will get sent. If the word "day" is sent to 'GVENT', a text message will get sent back that contains all of the day's events. "nday" can also be used to get a list of all schedules for the next day.

Way to go Google, always innovating. Just let me pull out my cheat sheet so I can take a look at all the other shortcuts like this I can use.

With so many hassles and things to worry about when moving, why not hire a professional. Better yet, check out a free service called Moveme.

Moveme is based and focused on the London, UK area. It offers individuals and families an easy way to keep track of their moving tasks like changing mailing addresses, forwarding mail, hiring a moving truck and activating new utilities. The interface is clean, simple, and easy to navigate. Upon entering your current, new address and date to be moved in, Moveme plots everything down on a calendar, and schedules tasks from the current date up until the move time. Task can be viewed in a list format, on a calendar, and reminders can be sent out. Letters and forms can also be created through Moveme to inform your contacts and suppliers of your new address.

Tired of waiting until you get to your office or home to check appointments in Google Calendar? Wait no more, Google has just added the ability to make Calendar items available on mobile devices.

Google's Calendar for mobile devices can be activated by visiting "calendar.google.com" from your phone. When logged in, you can see upcoming events with dates, times, locations, descriptions and even guest lists. Will we soon see a mobile application for this? Maybe, given Gmail's track record.

Needless to say, you might not have to fiddle around with plugins and extensions to sync Google Calendar with Outlook from now on. Just remember to watch your data rates if you don't have unlimited service on your mobile.

Calling all Google Apps users, your schedule might not be spot-on this Thursday.

Users of Google Apps can expect some downtime during routine maintenance of the Google Calendar Thursday April 26th, from 8AM to 9PM. As is expected with any sort of maintenance, downtimes may and will occur and in this case Google Calendar might not be accessible for some time. Scheduled maintenance during daylight hours, what gives, Google?

This blow to users scheduling sure does make us wonder if Google Apps is worth using for our main scheduling application. It is understandable that system upgrades have to occur in order to improve services, it just sucks that we are now forced to suffer.

For Google Apps support you can check out http://www.google.com/support/a/

Drop a comment on Thursday to let us all know if you were affected by the maintenance and approx. how long your downtime lasted for.

UPDATE: More info on the scheduled maintenance from Google:

Why are we doing an upgrade?
We are updating some of our servers as we continue to improve Google Calendar. This is a normal maintenance update, and as with all updates we look to minimize the impact to our end users.

How will this impact my end users?
The impact to your users should be minimal. Only a subset of your users should be affected by the upgrade. These users may have trouble accessing their Google Calendars for a short period of time, generally less than 5-10 minutes each.

Will Google Calendar be down from 8AM to 9PM PDT?
No. This is the window of time that the maintenance upgrade will take place. During this time some users will experience issues accessing their calendar, but only for a short period of time each.

Everyone knows its America's number one pastime, and now Google has announced their entrance into the TV ad market.

There has been a lot of speculation recently surrounding the fact that Google's been nosing around the TV market to extend their offline ad experimentations, and it was just a matter of time before the news officially dropped. With this new TV Ad trial, Google hopes to improve user experiences and bring value to both advertisers and publishers. They are currently working with EchoStar and Astound Cable to deliver ads to viewers, as well as helping advertisers and programmers buy, schedule, deliver and of course measure ads on television. We also dropped news this morning about how Google and Dish Networks will be announcing a deal to serve ads over their network.

The ads will be purchased through an automated interface auction model, pricing based on a CPM basis with ads then targeted by demographic, time of day and channel. The ads will be delivered with all reporting and statistics done through set top box technologies. The boxes will report on how many times an ad was viewed and whether it was watched in completion.

So needless to say, if more advertisers buy into Google's technology and take the statistics into consideration when planning campaigns, we might never see boring, useless commercials ever again! Then again, it sure does feel a little like big brother is watching us.

HiTask is an online based task management tool that collects tasks, groups them and applies colored tags so users can easily review them. The HiTask interface is built with an easy to use drag and drop calendar to schedule items and reshuffle or prioritize them as needed. Tasks can also be rearranged in groups or projects for added organization.

The scheduling of meetings, reminders or notes can be setup by dragging and dropping their instance onto a calendar and dragging instances down based on how much time is required. Colors can be assigned to tasks to highlight important tasks or categorize them. HiTask can also be used in a team environment by inviting members and easily assigning those tasks by dragging them onto the individual's name.

The interface is very clean, and it's simple to use, there is no learning curve here that's for sure, and the drag and drop feature makes it easy to organize. Now, is it fun? I wouldn't call it fun, but it is pleasant to use. If the free plan isnt enough for you, there is also a Premium account available for $12 U.S. per year that allows for unlimited everything.


[via mashable]

Here's a neat little utility with questionable usefulness and a less-than-intuitive UI - but, yes, it's neat. AmbientClock pulls appointments from your Google Calendar and maps them along a circular analog clock. You can also add a secondary calendar (such as that of a co-worker or spouse) for a visual representation of schedule conflicts.

So far, I can't really see what AmbientClock accomplishes that plain ol' Google Calendar doesn't, aside from the "oh crap look how little free time I have today, when am I going to eat?" factor. You can add it to your Google homepage, which I suppose is useful in the at-a-glance sense. However, browsing to future dates didn't work for me in Firefox 2.0. But since it's in beta, I'll cut it some slack.

Apparently, if all goes well, AmbientClock will soon be more than just a Google gadget - it'll be a standalone device. As in, an actual, three-dimensional product you can place on your desk!