Murphy Mac

The Google Calendar can send reminders to your mobile phone, but it’s an all-or-nothing deal. There’s no checkbox in an appointment to specify if you want an sms notification. The checkbox is in the Calendar Settings, and it’s universal.

Here’s Murphy’s workaround: The calendar can send an email reminder to your Gmail account for every appointment. You can set up a filter in Gmail to send the reminders to your cell phone, if they meet a preset criteria.  Then you can create appointments like “Lunch with Leo mbl” - the mbl will tell gmail to email the message to your phone.  This is great for users of the Quick Add feature in Google Calendar.

In the screencast Murphy tells Gmail to forward messages that contain “mbl” to the email address his mobile carrier provides. In the United States many mobile phones can be emailed using 123456@teleflip.com - where 123456 is your ten-digit mobile number. Try it if you don’t know the email address of your mobile phone.

What does this have to do with Macs you ask? Read on.A London reader asked Murphy about sending sms reminder messages from iCal. The reader indicated that their carrier doesn’t provide an email address for texting. Murphy’s not a big sms user - or an iCal user for that matter - can anyone help the loyal Murphy Mac reader?

Here’s one idea. iCal can run an AppleScript as an alarm. The AppleScript could send the sms via another application, like Skype. If you have information about sms clients that work with iCal or AppleScript please post it in the comments!

Check out Google for more information on getting Calendar information on your phone. You can even query your Calendar with a text sent from your phone.Click for a follow-up to this post.

With iWeb it’s easy to make fantastic looking content in a matter of minutes. To keep things simple, iWeb never shows you a single line of html. For some that’s good. For others it’s frustrating.

If you check around on the web you’ll find some workarounds. A common theme: Put a placeholder on your page - like a word that will stand out. After publishing you can scan your html for the standout word and replace it with whatever html code you want on your iWeb page.

Murphy’s going to make it even easier. He’s using a free tool called iWebMore. We’ll put a rounded-rectangle on the page as a placeholder. We’ll add the html inside the rectangle, then let iWebMore do the dirty work of updating our html after we publish.

You could use this method to add all kinds of code scraps. Digg buttons, videos, Adsense banners - all kinds of content. Even just a few simple lines of html that iWeb couldn’t do for you. Suddenly iWeb isn’t half as limited as you once thought.

Remember, you’re altering the pages after you publish. That means if you publish again you’ll have to process your pages again using iWebMore to update the html. iWeb doesn’t know you altered the html.

In the screencast we’ll add a small piece of Google script to our page that pulls our favorite stories from Google Reader. As we mark stories as favorites in Google Reader, our iWeb generated page will update with new links. This is a great way to keep your site fresh, and provide your readers with content that interests you.

Down the road we’ll take a look at making the changes manually. For now, iWebMore makes it really easy. Who knows, maybe the next version of iWeb will take care of this for us??

Related information: See the screencast for automating iWeb syncing with a third party host.

This slipped by Murphy when he was putting together RSS week. But it’s pretty cool so we’re posting this follow-up.

The Google Reader page itself IS an RSS feed. So you can load up Reader with all the feeds you want to look at - then use another RSS tool like Safari to view them.

Note: This is also the inaugural Microscast on Murphy Mac. What’s a Microcast? It’s a screencast that’s so short and focused that it won’t count as the snippet of the day. Look for them here and there!

If you haven’t noticed, Murphy uses some Google stuff. He likes the Calendar because he can access it from any computer with Internet access.

But sometimes Internet access is hard to come by. You know you won’t have access for a couple days? Use iCal to capture a Google Calendar to your disk.

You can also use Google Calendar to display published calendars for public events. Murphy is going to show you how to incorporate such a calendar into an iCal based calendar.

If you’re interested in syncing iCal information to Google, there are projects underway. Follow this link to SourceForge and this one to jin’sync.

There’s also an interesting warning about what you put on a shared Google calendar. In the screencast we use a private URL to help hide our calendar information from prying eyes. But security is still something to consider when you’re telling people where you’re going to be and when.

When your feeds pile up you might need to look beyond Safari and Firefox. There are standalone applications designed just for handling feeds. Want to try one without trying too hard? Look no further than your Google account. The Google Reader is still in beta, but it’s got some slick features.

This screencast runs through the basic features. The interface is a little offbeat, but so is Gmail - right? If you try out the reader, add Murphy Mac to your subscribed feeds. Many sites have links to add them to Google or My Yahoo.
We’re almost done with RSS week. Based on the mail Murphy’s gotten it was a huge success. We’ll be back to business as usual next week.

Reminder: Google Reader is still in the lab. Your results may vary.