Web 2. Point. Oh?
Posted in Observations — by Don on 02/24/07

Oh sure. I’m a pretty savvy web guy as most of you already know.

I use del.icio.us, flickr, Gmail and Firefox with a big pile of extensions. I know what’s up. Hell, I even make a podcast!

But, there are 2 new tools, if you will, in my quiver and I’m liking them fine, so I thought I’d share.

The first some of you already know about. That would be Twitter. Part blog, kinda. Part IM, kinda. Part text message, kinda. You’ve seen the widget over there for awhile now (or, here for you feed readers) and I think it’s quite fun! What it does is allow you to post random messages for anyone to follow. You can post from the site, your phone, AIM, gtalk, and there is even a Firefox extension! Plus a snazzy app for the mac. There are already a bunch of folks using it, including the BBC and someone is posting the daily Woot offerings. Anyway, like I said, I think it’s fun. If you want to try it out, you can find me there as dbwilldo.

The next piece of web gadgetry I’ve been totally diggin’ is 30 boxes. It’s an online calendar. Yes, another online calendar, but this one totally picks up where the others leave off.

First, you can add entries by typing them in plain English. Tomorrow 11am meet the parents for example. You can import or export like you would expect. You can tag (like del.icio.us or gmail), it interacts with much of your other web2.0 stuff (flickr, twitter, del.icio.us and others I think) plus you can add whatever RSS feed you like. Now, here is the cool part. When you are looking at the calendar and you point at a day, EVERYTHING that happened on that day is listed. Flickr posts, rss feed items, whatever. It’s all there. Plus the now standard social networking aspect you have come to expect from these types of applications. Brilliant I say! Absolutely brilliant!

I highly recommend everything listed here. Especially 30boxes and (:gasp: you don’t use this already?)del.icio.us.

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(11) comments
  • http://www.cjupin.com chris

    Great post- love the techy talk. Any reason why you use 30boxes versus the google calendar? I tried the demo and the interface looks similar (however, I do like the ability to sync to iCal).

  • db

    gCal is great, don’t get me wrong! But 30boxes does a few more things. The biggest thing is its ability to let me see posts from sites (that I link the feed for) on the grid for the day they are posted. Flickr and del.icio.us work the same way.

    And the plain english entry.

    And the UI. It’s easier to share calendars, setup more calendars and all that I think. Sharing a calendar in gCal is kind of a pain I always thought, same with setting up a new calendar.

  • http://guapacha.com paul

    I like twitter though it sure is slow to load most of the time. But my current WP theme doesn’t have a column wide enough to put the box in. And my CSS skills aren’t up to the job of widening it seems….

  • http://www.cjupin.com chris

    Hey- I played around a little more with the 30boxes site- this is slick! Integration with flickr! This will be great for my wife and I in terms of having a joint calendar…

    db- have you checked out http://pipes.yahoo.com/ ? The UI is pretty slick…I’m trying to create an RSS mashup with whiteroofradio and motoringfile as well as the flickr pools and frappr maps into one “pipe.” I think I may need to peruse the help forum for a while…

  • db

    I have checked it out. Only briefly. The UI looked slick and confusing. I’m going to check that out more in another week or so.

  • http://www.carlweetabix.co.uk brad.

    hey db, have you fiddled at all with using the 30boxes calendar with any of the car club sites you’ve set up.

    i might see how it works with our BMW chapter’s site.

    brad.

  • db

    I haven’t since our message board system has a really slick calendar built in that automatically ties in with the message board thread.

    I can see this being useful for a car club (or multiples). But to get the full use out of it, your members would have to sign up for an account at 30boxes, and a lot of people, for whatever reason, still don’t like to do that.

  • http://www.c-villeminis.org brad.

    well, so long as they could see what i’ve entered in the calendar, that might work. i don’t have a message board installed for our BMW club site as we had one that was hosted off site for free by justracing.com so i didn’t want to have folks re-register for a second forum when i re-did the website.

    i just like the look of the 30boxes one better than any of the other webcalendars out there. i’ll give it a shot and see what happens. thanks!

    brad.

  • http://www.c-villeminis.org brad.

    update: i added a badge to our chapter website. seems to work fairly well. easier to read than the little WP calendar i was using before. check it:

    http://www.blueridgebmwcca.org/

    thanks again, db, for all all your WP help!

    brad.

  • db

    Cool!

    Except, when I click the link, it doesn’t go to the calendar. It goes to your buddy page. Maybe it’s because I’m already a registered user?

  • http://www.c-villeminis.org brad.

    hmm, strange…it goes to my event list for me.

    oh, wait…i see what you mean. it was the hyperlinked “Blue Ridge BMW CCA” link…yeah, that one went to the buddy list by default from the 30boxes badge.

    if you click on the list of events it takes you to the full event list page. i’ve just now changed the hyperlink to go to the full calendar now.

    i mainly wanted the badge because it showed and at-a-glance view of the calendar…the word press calendar widget didn’t look as good, too small. but 30boxes doesn’t have a good url input for what i need as far as downloading forms and such…easier to do that on my event details page.

    thanks for the troubleshoot!

    b.

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