Free/Busy Times via Office Online

tools, ,

To keep updated, I am just starting publishing my free/busy times to Office Online. First of all, register with Office Online, this shouldn’t take that long if you have already a Windows Live account.

Select Calendar

Open Outlook and chose the calendar you want to publish by right-clicking it in the task pane.

Publish to Office Online

Now select ‘Publish to Internet’ and then ‘Publish to Office Online…’. After doing some registration you can finally choose the options for publishing the calendar.

Publishing Calendar Options

We are going to choose the granularity of details we want to publish. In my case I choose the  ‘Availability only’ option.

Availability Option

Then I am going to allow everybody to see these availability times. If you are going to publish more details, you might want to consider to share your calendar only with invited users.

Permissions Options

At the end I am going to check the ‘Advanced Options’.

Advanced Options

In this case, I am fine with the automatic uploads. After confirming, the initial upload is performed. In the task pane you’ll now find another icon for your calendar indicating that it is shared.

New Icon for Calendar

Finally, my free/busy times are now available.

LibraryThing Widget

web, ,

I just spend some minutes this evening updating the LibraryThing Widget CSS styles.

LibraryThing Widget

The DIV classes used by LibraryThing are as follows:

.LTwrapper .LTheader .LTitem .LTprovided

LTwrapper is for the whole widget, LTheader only for the “Random books I have” line, Ltitem for each book and finally .LTprovided for the footer “powered by LibraryThing”.

However, to get some more flexibility in the layout you should make usage of the cascading property in CSS and define the .LTitem img class to position the images. It could look like the following then:

.LTitem img { float: right; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; }

LibraryThing

tools,

I mentioned it before today: I started to create my virtual book shelf for technical books in LibraryThing a few days ago. It allows you adding new books by simply selecting them from a list. By entering the title, author or ISBN number you just query one of many book directories such as the Library of Congress or simply amazon.com. If you don’t find your book (e.g. in my case a couple of German books) you can add alternative Amazon websites. There are some interesting features in this kind of features I am interested in: (1) you can export your information to tab-delimited or CSV files. (2) You can easy access all the book information including cover images without typing all the information in first. (3) LibraryThing provides an API to access the information. I haven’t found time to check the API yet, but it allows you to receive simple information based on the submitted ISBN, title or language of the book.

LibraryThing

Twittered

web

Writing a blog entry takes some time, Twitter let’s you easy drop a line about what you are doing right now. It includes mobile phones (yeah!) and instant messaging. Unfortunately It does only include GTalk, LiveJournal and Jabber – no MSN Messenger. The API is quite simple and the widget provided is pure HTML/JavaScript. I remember about that suggestion while performing the theSpoke tests a few years ago. BtK and me have seen some potential in this…

Gravatar

blog-o-sphere, 1 Comment

GRAVATRdasBlog does finally support Gravatars. One step more away from the anonym beginnings of the web. Check the comments of this blog entry to view how they work. Definitely another Web 2.0 application. Gravatars can be easy added to any weblog:

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

Krugle

web

Do you know this feeling?

“I know what to do, and how to solve the problem, but I do not know the bloody API.”

I just met the guys implementing the Krugle search engine over here at ICWE 2006. And it does work quite well.

Web Map

web

I just checked out the Kartoo map using aheil as query. Interesting links and relations are found by this tool. But I do not have any clue how ww.cwea.org is realted to the whole map.

Kartoo