So I'm at Sacred Chow, doing the thing where I pretend to know what I'm doing, with regards to techy stuff. You ask me to design you a flyer? I can do that in my sleep. You ask me to cook something? No problem. Tell me what you want, and I'll churn out something delicious.
You ask me to maintain a website? I'm going to cry and hide behind large objects.
So today, I realised that our site is a little ... behind the times. There's lots of places where they have very functional and useful features. We've got our facebook connect and twitter connect, but that's pretty ghetto as far as outreach goes. It means we depend on outside sources to make our in-house stuff get out there. It's fine for minor updates and the rest, but those features stunt your ability to get out the maximum information on the main website.
Enter, the event calendar. For anyone who's seen one of these before, you'll know how eminently useful they can be. You can set certain people to have posting access, sync it up to your outlook (to post, or to receive), and it makes the reaching out thing a lot smoother. Furthermore, it keeps you organised, and with it.
So I decided to use WebCalendar, because it would run natively on the server, since our hosting allows PHP and a database. What I didn't anticipate is that our server doesn't /have/ a pre-made database in there already, like ODBC, or what have you.
I looked a little green in the face, as I realised that I'd have to install some sort of database server.
At that very moment, I realised that I was way out of my depth, and would have to google around for ages to figure this stuff out.
Google around for ...
Duh.
Google Calendars.
That was way easier than it should have been, and I'm silently kicking myself for being so dumb as to have missed that big giant "easy" button that Google tends to put onto everything. Oh. And the stupid easy part? Adding in all the Jewish and USA holidays to the thing, and having them automatically update. This way, when we add our events, it'll show up /under/ the existing day that it corresponds to, without us having to make a specific post. Ye gods, this promises to be quite useful, and I'm glad I finally thought to include the thing.
http://sacredchow.com/whisper.htm
In case you're curious, go ahead and take a gander at the little calendar in her new home. Drop by and say hi.
You ask me to maintain a website? I'm going to cry and hide behind large objects.
So today, I realised that our site is a little ... behind the times. There's lots of places where they have very functional and useful features. We've got our facebook connect and twitter connect, but that's pretty ghetto as far as outreach goes. It means we depend on outside sources to make our in-house stuff get out there. It's fine for minor updates and the rest, but those features stunt your ability to get out the maximum information on the main website.
Enter, the event calendar. For anyone who's seen one of these before, you'll know how eminently useful they can be. You can set certain people to have posting access, sync it up to your outlook (to post, or to receive), and it makes the reaching out thing a lot smoother. Furthermore, it keeps you organised, and with it.
So I decided to use WebCalendar, because it would run natively on the server, since our hosting allows PHP and a database. What I didn't anticipate is that our server doesn't /have/ a pre-made database in there already, like ODBC, or what have you.
I looked a little green in the face, as I realised that I'd have to install some sort of database server.
At that very moment, I realised that I was way out of my depth, and would have to google around for ages to figure this stuff out.
Google around for ...
Duh.
Google Calendars.
That was way easier than it should have been, and I'm silently kicking myself for being so dumb as to have missed that big giant "easy" button that Google tends to put onto everything. Oh. And the stupid easy part? Adding in all the Jewish and USA holidays to the thing, and having them automatically update. This way, when we add our events, it'll show up /under/ the existing day that it corresponds to, without us having to make a specific post. Ye gods, this promises to be quite useful, and I'm glad I finally thought to include the thing.
http://sacredchow.com/whisper.htm
In case you're curious, go ahead and take a gander at the little calendar in her new home. Drop by and say hi.
