Technology Bites recently brought my attention to two different online PDF creation tools: PrimoOnline and Acrobat.com.  To choose between them I took them for a quick test drive.

Acrobat.com is by far the more appealing site of the two.  The site usability is as polished as you would expect from an Adobe product, despite its beta status.  It also provides storage space for your documents and the ability to share them with others.  Its achilles heel would appear to be the 5 PDF conversion limit quoted in both the Technology Bites post and the Acrobat.com user guide.  Whether by accident or design this limit is not enforced at this time.  During testing I converted 6 documents in 15 minutes with no issues.

By comparison the PrimoOnline interface is spartan but functional.  It provides a basic web form to specify the file to convert and the email address to send it to, and quickly sends the result to your inbox.  Its claim to fame is having 300 formats it can convert into PDF.  Upon reviewing the list most would be readable by MS Office applications so I’m not sure how useful this will be for most people in practice.

The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, as they say.  I ran the same test document through both services (Acrobat.com output and PrimoOnline output) and here are my observations about the results:

• PrimoOnline does not honour the fonts used in the source document.  If you compare the test documents you will find that Acrobat.com’s output is near identical to the input document, while PrimoOnline has substituted fonts and looks noticeably different.
• As expected neither service coped with the Enhanced MetaFile (EMF) included in the document.  For some reason the most space efficient way to copy Visio objects into Word documents is also the most difficult to convert into PDF form.  The Device Independent Bitmap version of the diagram converted successfully on both services and demonstrates how the EMF version should have looked.
• Acrobat.com consistently output smaller files than PrimoOnline.  It was also the only service to include a Bookmarks list, though both services do generate clickable hyperlinks in their output.  This feature is one of the main advantages these services have over a PDF printer based solution.

Based upon the test results Acrobat.com is a clear winner, provided that Adobe continue to ignore (or remove) their quoted 5 conversion limit.  Given its difficulties maintaining document formatting I’d find it hard to recommend PrimoOnline unless you were purely looking for a universal document converter so aesthetics were less critical.

Via Technology Bites

In my last post I explained how to use the Photoshop Elements’ (PSE) Copy/Move to Removable Disk feature to move part of your collection to lower cost disk while still retaining visibility within your catalogue.  To make the best use of this feature there are a few caveats, and workarounds for them, you need to keep in mind:

1. No Photo Review/Compare of Offline Images: Despite allowing you to choose offline proxy file sizes as large as 1280 x 960 pixels, the Photo Compare/Review features will not display offline images unless the media is currently mounted.  While I understand the proxy file’s quality would not compare to that of an online file, why couldn’t they just display the "offline file" icon to explain the lower quality image (like they do in the main browser UI)? 
   Workaround: Photo Review can be emulated in the PSE browser by zooming the offline file to maximum size.  Photo Compare can be emulated in a similar way by adding tags/collections to the images, selecting them, then zooming so only two photos appear in the PSE browser.
2. Directory Structure Flattened During Move: All of my photos are stored in a YYYY-MM-MMM\category\yyyy_mm_dd_desc directory structure on my HDD.  When moving photos offline I’d like to automatically retain this relative directory structure but there is currently no way to do so without manually calling the Move Offline function once per destination directory.
   Workaround: Run Move Offline once per destination directory.  e.g. I move photos offline a month at a time.
3. No Way to Identify if Media Online: The Details Metadata query provides no way to search for media based upon whether they are offline or not.  It also provides no way to search by the volume the file is currently stored upon.  Offline photos aren’t automatically assigned tags or collections so this can’t be used to identify the files either.
   Workaround: Assign a tag to photos as you move them offline, and later use this tag to find or exclude the photos.
4. No Way to Move Images Back Online: Hard drives are becoming larger and cheaper all the time, so over time photos that had to be moved offline for space reasons may be able to be moved back online after hardware upgrades.  PSE provides no obvious way to achieve this.
   Workaround: Select files in the PSE browser and use the File\Move option to move files to an online directory.  Alternately delete files from the catalogue and re-import, but if using this approach you should File\Write Keyword Tags and Properties Info to File to retain captions and tags (collection information will be lost).
5. Cannot Bulk Relocate Images on Removable Media/Network Drives:  PSE does not provide any easy way to move the files once they have been moved offline.  This is particularly problematic when having to relocate images as media fails,  or larger media becomes available. e.g. a USB hard drive is lost or fails, or refresh optical media by moving DVD content to larger Bluray disks.  This issue is exacerbated by PSEs insistence on storing network drives as the underlying UNC paths, and identifying optical media by their serial number rather than drive letter, so you can’t just copy the files manually and map them to the same drive letter.
   Workaround: Use the "Move online" workaround, then move the images offline again.

As long as you adjust your digital photography workflow to take these caveats into account, the Move Offline feature remains an extremely useful way to make use of your precious disk space.

With the current popularity of digital cameras and cameraphones, surely my hard drive can’t be the only one bursting at the seams with the sheer volume of photos we are capturing? A quick scan found 26 Gb of photos on my laptop… no wonder I usually have less than 150 Mb of disk space free!  In this post I’m going to explain how to reclaim your harddrive using Adobe Photoshop Elements (PSE) 6’s removable media feature to move lower value photos offline without losing the ability to work with those photos within PSE.

Photoshop Elements Move to Removable Media Feature

I’ve been using a digital photography workflow based upon Peter Krogh’s work in The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers.  As a result I have been rating my photos before processing them, and have a number rated Neutral that are of low value and unlikely to be used, but I’m not quite ready to delete.  These are ideal candidates for moving to cheaper and more flexible offline storage to free up disk space.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 has a feature that allows you to move content to removable media while still allowing you to see the files within PSE’s catalog.  If you subsequently attempt to edit one of these files, or perform any other action that would require access to the source file, you will be prompted to reload or remount the media the file was moved to. 

When moving photos offline your original file will be substituted with a proxy file: a low resolution version that will be used when viewing the file in the catalog.  The size of the proxy file can be configured using the Edit\Preferences\Files menu option.

My photos are taken using a Nikon D70S that I usually keep in "Raw + Basic" mode.  This means I have two copies of each photo, one in the ubiquitous JPEG  format and a higher quality RAW file in case I need to edit the photo.  To pick my ideal proxy file size I needed to balance the disk space saving against the usability benefits of a larger proxy file.  My tests with a sample photo generated the following proxy file sizes:

I’ve included the generated files so you can gain an appreciation for the quality and size of the proxy files you will be working with in the browser.

As a result of these tests I’ve chosen to use the 800 x 600 proxy file setting.  This replaces 6 Mb of photos with 270 Kb of proxy files, which in rough figures means I could replace my whole photo collection with about 1 Gb of proxy files if I chose to move them all offline!

Moving photos offline

Preparation

Before moving my photos offline I like to write all of my Photoshop Elements metadata to the files, in case I need to access those files from another program or my catalog becomes damaged in some way.  You can do this by selecting a group of files and using the File\Write Keyword Tags and Properties Info to File menu option.  All tag (but not album) information will be written to the images, where the metadata can be read by any XMP aware program.

Writing the tags to file also helps you to capture some data that will be lost during the move.  The File\Copy/Move to Removable Disk function moves all selected files to a single destination directory, so you will be flattening your directory structure unless you chose to move files offline in many smaller batches.  For low value photos I don’t believe retaining the directory structure is worth the effort, but I do use Phil Harvey’s exiftool program to write directory information to a text file in case I change my mind later.  A command such as this:

exiftool -r -m -p "$XMP-xmp:Rating,$Directory\$FileName,$Keywords" * > Ratings.txt

produces a comma separated value (CSV) file such as the following:

1,2007_08_04_LindaAndBenjamin\MSD_20070804_160136.dng,
0,2007_08_04_LindaAndBenjamin\MSD_20070804_160136.xmp,
,2007_08_04_LindaAndBenjamin\MSD_20070804_160140.JPG,Ben S, Linda, Neutral

which should have sufficient information to allow reconstruction of the directory structure if it ever proves necessary to do so.

Execution

To move your photos offline use the following steps:

1. Open the File\Copy/Move to Removable Disk menu option, select the "Move File" check box, and click Next.
   
2. Select the drive you want to move the files to, enter a volume label, select the directory to write the files to, then click Done.
   You will notice in the screenshot that I use a month based directory naming scheme when moving files offline.  This makes it easier to find the files in other programs without requiring much effort to implement.  If my directory structure had been retained by PSE I wouldn’t have needed to bother with this sub-step.
   Please note: If moving files to a large capacity removable media such as a USB harddrive it is not worth uniquely naming each batch or directory as the data does not get referenced in future dialogs or the Browser’s Folders view.
   
3. If moving files to a partially used disk click Yes when the following warning appears:
   "This disk you have inserted is not empty. Would you like to add to this disk?"
4. When the copy step is complete you will see the following dialog:
   "Disk 1 is done…".  Click OK.
5. If you selected the "Move Files" option in step 1), the following dialog will appear.
   
   Click Yes and the online copies of your files will be deleted, potentially leaving the offline files as your only remaining copies.

Followup

Once the files have been moved offline, the files will still be visible in the catalog but will display an icon whenever the removable media is not currently mounted or loaded.  The files will also be visible in the "Offline Media" section of the folder tree in the "Folder Locations" browser view.

Despite the fact that PSE can detect which files are currently offline, the Adobe developers neglected to provide an easy way to search for offline files in the catalog itself.  To work around this limitation I add an "Offline" tag to all photos that have been moved offline.  I considered recording this information using an album instead, but I’ve yet to find a way to search for all photos not in an album (e.g. only find photos not in the offline photos album) so albums could not support my intended workflow.  

Moving them back

Another strange oversight by Adobe is there is no obvious way to reverse moving files offline.  PSE obviously knows that a file has been moved offline onto removable media, but there is no simple "Move file back online" option provided to reverse the process.

Instead you must use the File\Move menu option to relocate the offline files back to online data storage. 

1. In PSE’s browser select the offline files you wish to move back online
2. Select the File\Move menu option. 
3. Browse for the destination directory to move the files to, then click OK.

While this is easy enough to perform there are some notable limitations:

• Proxy files that are no longer required don’t get removed
• Your old directory structure is not restored
• Your new directory structure is not retained

So moving files offline and back will consume more disk space than if you had just left your files online in the first place, and you will lose implied metadata (your directory structure) in the process.

I’ve discussed my vision of calendar nirvana in previous posts, and tried to get closer to it using Microsoft Outlook’s inbuilt ability to publish calendars to the internet.  As I discovered this feature is rather limited and couldn’t publish to Google Calendar (despite Microsoft’s assurances otherwise). 

Google has recently released a Google Calendar Sync application to perform uni- or bi-directional synchronisation of your Outlook and Google Calendars.  Its time to test if this will help me publish my up-to-date master calendar to the web.

Testing 1-way: Microsoft Outlook calendar to Google Calendar

My calendar data is pretty important to me so I’ll be testing a one-way sync from my master calendar (in Outlook) to Google Calendar before I’ll consider enabling the 2 way option.  As a seasoned beta tester of PIM software I know how painful duplicate or corrupted calendars can be so there was no way I’d risk giving an unproven tool write access to my master calendar if I have any other option.  I also backed up my Outlook calendar (zipped a copy of my .pst file) and exported my current calendar from Google Calendar, using the private iCal link, before installing the software.  Did I mention that I’ve been burnt before when testing PIM software?

The Google Calendar Sync application is quite small (version 0.9.3.0 was 662 kb to download and 1.3 Mb to install) and the UI to configure it is fairly spartan.  A summary of my key installation and configuration steps are included below:

1. Backup your Outlook calendar before testing the software.  The Outlook calendar can be backed up by closing Outlook and creating a copy of your main calendar’s .pst file, or by taking a copy of your main calendar folder within the Outlook UI.
2. Backup your primary Google Calendar.  This can be done via a right click\Save As on the private iCal link within the Google Calendar’s Manage Calendars options panel.
3. Navigate to Google’s Manage Accounts facility and make use of the Edit personal information option.  At the bottom of this page should be the following section:
   

   Associate email addresses with your account

   ---

   Adding email addresses helps Google associate useful information with your Google Account. For example, Google Calendar can show invitations sent to any of your addresses.

   If you haven’t previously done so add email addresses for your default Outlook account, and any other email accounts that would have been used to invite you to the calendar appointments. This is required to address one of the known limitations of the sync software that would otherwise prevent certain calendar entries from syncing.

4. Complete the previous step by opening the emails sent by Google and clicking on the verification links.
5. Download a copy of the Google Calendar Sync application and install it, accepting all of the default options.
6. Select the 1 way sync from Outlook to Google Calendar option, and enter your Google Calendar account settings. 
7. Save the configuration and your calendar will begin syncing to Google Calendar.

The Verdict: Most events synchronise, but not all

Google Calendar Sync did a pretty good job of publishing my calendar, but refused to synchronise certain events despite attempts to force them to be published. 

Most of my recurring appointments didn’t make it across.  The most difficult example to synchronise was a meeting scheduled for Monday, Wednesday and Friday most weeks (with specific instances cancelled on public holidays etc.), but there were many simple recurring appointments (e.g. weekly and monthly meetings) that also refused to synchronise.

A quick look at the log file (C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Calendar Sync\logs\20080317T114410Z.log) found a number of entries similar to:

Loading outlook event 00000000539C5B9F3396574893319BF96A8E727024512600
SEVERE: Unable to load tz label
SEVERE: Load failed (see details above)
sync to right -> import right event to left calendar

and

Loading outlook event 00000000539C5B9F3396574893319BF96A8E7270A4452700
SEVERE: Load failed (see details above)

Unfortunately I haven’t worked out how to resolve these (or even how to identify the problem events) and the issue isn’t covered by the current version of the FAQ or known limitations resources provided by Google.  So the application appears to have a lot of potential but the current version can’t be relied upon due to issues with synchronisation quality.

[via Teck.in and Lifehacker]

Previously I’ve discussed my version of calendar nirvana, and just how far I am away from it today.  its time to start removing some of those roadblocks by freeing my master calendar from its Outlook shackles and sharing it (appropriately) with others.

I’ve been keeping my master calendar in Outlook 2007 for a few months now.  Before that I was a Palm Desktop user (or more accurately an Agendus for Palm Desktop user), but the lack of software support for Palm Desktop based data wore me down until I eventually decided to convert.  Publishing my data to a web based calendar was one of the major triggers for this decision.

Outlook 2007 includes a calendar "Publish to Internet" feature so this was a natural starting point for my quest.  It supports two possible destinations - Publish to Office Online or Publish to WebDAV Server - and I have tested them both.

Publish to Office Online

Publish to Office Online takes an Outlook calendar and sends it through to one of Microsoft’s online calendar services.  The steps to enable this are discussed in depth in an article on the Office Online website and a post on the Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog.  A summary of the key steps are included below:

1. Right click on the Outlook calendar folder you wish to publish, and select the Publish to Internet\Publish to Office Online menu option
2. In the resultant dialog select the section of your calendar, level of detail and how accessible you want your online calendar to be.  For my purposes I want all of my detail to be up there (for my family’s benefit) but I want to restrict access to the information.
   
3. Click on the Advanced button at in the dialog.  Here you can control how frequently the information and updates are published.  The defaults were fine in my case, except I did want private details published to the site.
   
4. After clicking OK then OK you will be prompted for your Windows Live user ID (Passport) credentials so the information can be uploaded to Office Online.  After successfully entering this you will see a progress box as the data is uploaded.
5. Once the uploaded is complete you will be asked whether you want to notify others of the calendar’s availability.  In my case I wanted to make my family aware of the new calendar so I clicked Yes.  This sends an email with the webdav:// link to the calendar so they can subscribe to it from "any iCalendar compatible client".
   

The Verdict: Simple, but ineffective

The whole process is relatively painless, but the service didn’t live up to its advertising.  The post on the Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog mentioned earlier contained the following statements:

Any application that can read an .ics file can subscribe to the calendar. Users that do not have an .ics aware mail application can view the calendar at Office Online in a web browser.

Here is a short list of popular clients that implement ICalendar functionality. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list and that there are many other applications that provide this functionality.

Application	Publisher
Chandler (PIM)	Open Source Applications Foundation
Evolution	Novell & GNOME
Facebook.com	Facebook.com
Google Calendar	Google
iCal and iCal Server	Apple Computer
Kontact	The Kontact Team
Lotus Notes	IBM
Microsoft Entourage	Microsoft
Microsoft Exchange	Microsoft
Microsoft Outlook	Microsoft
Windows Calendar	Microsoft
Sun Java Calendar Server	Sun
Zimbra Collaboration Suite	Zimbra

My whole reason for publishing my calendar is so my family can access it from both Thunderbird/Lightning and Google Calendar.  I used the notify feature and then tried to help them subscribe to my calendar, but both of these products refused to read the data.  Details of the problems are listed below.

Using the "Add by URL" feature in Google Calendar resulted in an error message.

Changing the webcal:// to http:// didn’t help.  When I tried to embed the relevant Windows Live ID username and password in the URL (e.g. http://user:pass@URL) this wasn’t accepted as a valid URL because my Windows Live ID contains an at (@) symbol.  I’ve tried to work around the issue a number of ways but have had no success.  Others have reported the same problem so I’m not holding out much hope for this technique.

In Thunderbird/Lightning I tried similar approaches to get the the webcal:// URL to work but no matter what I did no data would appear in the GUI.  It would rarely complain about the URL, but it wouldn’t achieve its intended purpose.

In fact the only application I found that could subscribe to the calendar was Outlook 2007.  Even when I pointed Firefox at the URL it had difficulties.  It should have tried to download the .ics file but I ended up with this error message instead.

I’m not 100% sure where the problem lies but I believe it is a combination of requiring a Windows Live ID to subscribe to the calendar (see the description in the notification email above for detail) and using WebDAV instead of vanilla http/s.  This feature must have worked in the past because Chaz and others have posted about it but it definitely isn’t working right now.  I was originally willing to consider that the iCalendar clients might be the problem… until Firefox reported the redirection issue.  Too much evidence is mounting against Office Online in this case.

Publish to WebDAV Server

Using the Publish to WebDAV Server is a little more difficult than the previous option.  Not because of the Outlook configuration, but rather that you need to have write access to a suitable WebDAV server to store your calendar.  They are not as common as other forms of hosting though there is at least one free iCalendar WebDAV service available (ironically a Mac centric site).  Once again the steps to enable this are discussed in depth in an article on the Office Online website.  A summary of the key steps are included below:

1. Right click on the Outlook calendar folder you wish to publish, and select the Publish to Internet\Publish to WebDAV Server menu option
2. In the resultant dialog enter the http: URL for the folder to publish the calendar to into the Location box.  Outlook will automatically generate the .ics file name itself.
3. Select the section of your calendar, level of detail and how accessible you want your online calendar to be.  For my purposes I want all of my detail to be up there (for my family’s benefit) but I want to restrict access to the information. 
   
4. Click on the Advanced button at in the dialog.  Here you can control how frequently the information and updates are published.  The defaults were fine in my case, except I did want private details published to the site.
   
5. After clicking OK then OK you will be prompted for your WebDAV credentials (if required) so the information can be uploaded to your server.  After successfully entering this you will see a progress box as the data is uploaded. 

The Verdict: Unusual pre-requisites, but worked with Thunderbird/Lightning

Assuming you have access to a WebDAV server this option is also pretty painless to implement.  It too was unable to be subscribed to by Google Calendar, even when embedding the username/password in the URL, but the same URl worked fine with Thunderbird/Lightning even without embedding the username and password!

Results

The current Outlook 2007 calendar publication methods are a little disappointing and don’t deliver the outcomes they promise.  I’d like to see them support more standard publication methods - after all even Outlook’s Internet Free/Busy option can publish to a standard FTP server - and services other than the two limited options currently available.  I’m really surprised there hasn’t been some tie in with Windows Live Calendar if nothing else but it would be nice to think they would look further afield than that.

For the moment I’m using the WebDAV publication mechanism as a stop gap for sharing my master schedule but I’m actively looking for something better.  Calendar nirvana is still looking pretty far away right now.

Simon over at Download Squad recently drew my attention to the Capster utility:

Capster is a small executable that allows you to select applications that will start upon boot-up only if Caps Lock is on. And by small, we mean small, as in 5 kilobytes.

What is great about this is you now have a way to chose between three different PC startup profiles through holding a single key after the logon dialog:

1. Shift key = ignore applications in Startup folder
2. No key = run applications in Startup folder, excluding those using Capster’s Caps On setting
3. Capslock key = run applications in Startup folder, including those using Capster’s Caps On setting and excluding those using the Caps Off setting

Why would you want to do this?  In my case I use these for quick PC startup, offline startup (no network) and online startup (networked) respectively.  This brings my laptop to operational status in the quickest time with the major applications I’ll be needing on the day.  e.g. There is no point in me wasting RAM, CPU cycles and time waiting for twhirl to start if I’m not online at the time!

Capster is easy to use.  Simply start the application, browse for the program you want to control, select whether Caps must be on or off, then hit the Create Shortcut button.  This will add the shortcut to your Startup menu for execution the next time you start your PC.

By default most users will probably replace each shortcut in their Startup folder they want to control using Capster, which is a little cumbersome.  My preferred approach is to create a batch file listing all of the "Caps Only" startup applications and calling them that way.  For example I could create a startup-capson.bat file that contained the following entries:

start notepad.exe
start calc.exe

Please note the "start" entry at the beginning of each line.  This ensures the batch file doesn’t wait for Notepad to be shutdown before starting Calc.

Simon obviously didn’t have much use for Capster’s "Caps Off" setting but I can see situations where it would be useful.  In the scenario above I could easily have my offline startup launch a thick client to manage my Google Calendar (e.g. Outlook or Sunbird) and when online launch a thin client (e.g. Google Calendar as a Prism webapp) instead.

If you have applications that you often, but not always, want run at PC startup, download a copy of Capster and save yourself a little time every day!

I like to think of myself as a reasonable person.  I try not to be too demanding, and while I like to keep up with the latest advances in technology I’m usually not right on the bleeding edge.  But the current gulf between my calendar organisational regime and where I want it to be makes me wonder whether my self-image is truly accurate.

I have my own concept of calendar nirvana.  I’ll attain it when I can:

• Create, update and check all of my work, personal and family appointment details at any time and location.  Even when I have no network access and am not in front of my main PC
• Be able to check all of my family’s appointments at any time (including those I’m not participating in)
• Have controlled access to schedules by third parties, so clients, colleagues and myself can arrange meetings at times that are mutually acceptable
• Have all of my calendars work together seamlessly without manual intervention

That doesn’t seem a lot to ask for, does it?  There are a lot of people out there who work and have families so I find it hard to believe I’m the only one who wants their calendars to work this way.

Unfortunately my current calendar regime is nowhere near nirvana.  I’m doing better than most but its still a mess:

• My work calendar (Lotus Notes) won’t share its information with any other application, service or device so its only accessible via my laptop or a web browser.
• My colleagues also use Lotus Notes so I can access their schedule details, but my clients use Outlook so I’m unable to view their availability.
• My personal calendar is in Google Calendar so my whole family can have access, but I rarely work directly in the web UI.  Of late I have been accepting invitations via GMail but in the past I’ve used Thunderbird and Lightning (with the Google Calendar provider) to manage this personal calendar.
• The combined work/personal calendar I use as my master calendar is kept in Outlook 2007, and is bi-directionally synchronised with my Treo.  I manually recreate work appointments in here at the same time I accept/create them in Lotus Notes.  I subscribe to my personal calendar in Outlook and manually copy entries from the Google Calendar subscription to my main calendar.
• The combined work/personal calendar is published a couple of different ways.  I’m publishing internet free/busy (.ifb) information to a personal website so selected clients can have visibility of my availability through Outlook.  I’ve tried a couple of approaches for publishing the content of my calendar for my family’s benefit but have yet to find anything completely satisfactory.
• My family publish their main calendars in Google Calendar.  The alternate between using the web UI and Thunderbird and Lightning (with the Google Calendar provider) to manage this.  Currently the latter approach is preferred because Google Calendar can’t subscribe to my combined work/personal calendar the way it is published today.
• I also subscribe to my family’s and children’s calendars in Outlook 2007 (read only).

As you can see there are a lot of technologies, manual steps and potential failure points in how my calendar is managed today.  There are also certain aspects of nirvana that I can’t emulate at all (e.g. subscribe to client availability information in Lotus Notes) and would prefer not to do (e.g. store details of work appointments in Google Calendar) but are essential to the way I share my data today.

How can I reach nirvana?  There is no easy answer right now but I’m determined to move closer to my vision of the future and take out the manual steps in my calendar management regime.  I’ll share the good, bad and indifferent steps I take along the way.  Hopefully they may be of use to you in the journey to reach your personal version of calendar nirvana.

This morning I clicked on a link in a newsletter from Sun and was presented with a "server not found" error.  Odd, especially given I would expect a company of that size to have better QA than that.  When I found the same issue with a Software AG newsletter later in the day it was time to investigate.

Turns out this wasn’t a coincidence.  Both emails were using links passing through the same tracking server: promo-manager.server-secure.com.  I suspected our Corporate firewall was blocking the tracking server, but the content itself would be OK. 

Upon inspecting Firefox’s location bar it was obvious that the latter part was an encoded destination URL:

https://promo-manager.server-secure.com/pm/mail/link.php?id=98027102 &link=http%3A%2F%2Fau.sun.com%2Fedge%2F2008%2F02 %2Fentry_level.jsp%3Fcid%3D921839

This is good practice by the web developer but I hate manually trying to decode those things.  %3A is ":", %2F is "/", but anything beyond that is a struggle.  There had to be an easier way.

I’ve been tinkering with some Javascript recently and it occurred to me a bookmarklet should easily be able to tackle this task.  A quick rummage through a language reference and voila - the following bookmarklet was born.  Install it by dragging the link onto your toolbar.  Use it by opening the bookmarklet when on a page with an encoded URL.

Decode URI

The code isn’t rocket science.  It does exactly what I needed.

javascript:location.href=decodeURIComponent(location.href);

After I ran the bookmarklet the location bar contained the following.  All I had to do was discard everything prior to the "link=" entry and I was back in business!

https://promo-manager.server-secure.com/pm/mail/link.php?id=98027102 &link=http://au.sun.com/edge/2008/02/entry_level.jsp?cid=921839

Note: The initial URL above is currently working so it would seem our Corporate security guys are getting a little over zealous.

Availion runs a service to help you share your availability information - not your calendar - with others.  This is quite a powerful concept because its often more appropriate for others to know when you have time in your schedule rather than what you have in your schedule.  e.g. If I want to talk to two vendors about the same piece of work, if they can see each other’s meetings in my schedule they might focus on highlighting the other vendor’s weaknesses instead of addressing the request I’ve placed before them.

The service has quite a promising list of features and calendar support.  The key ones that caught my attention:

• Automatic - No Synchronization
• Email Your Availability
• Use With Multiple Calendars
• Supports Microsoft Outlook
• Supports Lotus Notes
• Supports Google Calendar
• Supports iCalendar

The two most compelling items on this list are Lotus Notes and Google Calendar.  This is the only tool I’ve found that states it supports publishing Lotus Notes free/busy information, and in the past Google Calendar has ignored any attempts to import internet free/busy information so I was curious whether it had resolved this issue.

The site provides only limited information about the product capabilities so I dived right in, signed up for a free account and downloaded the ~5Mb installer to try it out.

After installation I opened the program and saw a fairly basic looking calendaring application.  Stepping through the menu options I quickly came to the realisation this would be a proprietary service requiring others to download the GUI  if they wanted to see my availability.  Either that or I use the email facility to send snapshots of my schedule to others, which negates the "schedule meetings without my intervention" benefit that makes a free/busy service valuable in the first place.  Strike number one: I had been hoping for a service that would publish an ifb or vfb data file so calendar clients could directly lookup my availability when scheduling meetings without installing extra software.

Next I tried to add my Lotus Notes 6.5 calendar to the GUI.  Strike number 2: it didn’t matter whether I used the local replica or server options when adding my calendar, it always returned the same "unable to read availability from Lotus Notes" error.  If I shutdown the Notes client I saw a slightly different message telling me to make sure Notes was running, so I made sure the client was running and I had my File\Security\User Security "Don’t prompt for a password from other Notes-based programs (reduces security)" preference checked, but that didn’t help either.

Strike number 3?  The complete set of Lotus Notes configuration documentation is a single page with a few screenshots and scant commentary.  It describes only part of the configuration process and didn’t help with my particular situation.  No indication of Lotus Notes client versions supported.  Using the application’s help facility referred me back to the same page.  No general help information, FAQ or forum is available.  Any help with this problem requires me to talk to their support staff but strangely enough they have yet to respond to my request given its Sunday today.

This service promised a lot but failed to deliver.  Even if the Lotus Notes functionality had worked the proprietary nature of the service would have kept me looking for a better, more open option that didn’t require my clients to install yet another piece of software on their PCs.  My search for schedule synchronisation nirvana continues.

(Via CalendarReview)

As part of my experiments with social media sites I came across the iBlogStats site.  Its a great external dashboard for your blog, but it gave me a nasty shock by highlighting I had about 50 xHTML validation errors on my homepage!

Over the past month I’ve found that my posts have consistently had 40 to 50 validation errors before I manually hunt them down and resolve them.  All of the posts were published using a combination of Windows Live Writer (WLW) and Wordpress.  While I find them to be very easy to use the lack of quality in the output (and the effort required to repair it) made me wonder whether I’d chosen the right platform for my blog.

Some of the errors I was experiencing:

• paragraph end tags with no begin tag
• div tags surrounded by paragraph tags
• attribute construction errors where a title attribute had been moved within hyperlink, and had been concatenated with the href attribute instead of relocated after it
• img tags that weren’t properly terminated

… and the list goes on.  To make matters worse I couldn’t resolve the errors directly in the Wordpress online editor because it insisted on converting div tags to paragraph tags, destroying the visual style of the posts in the process!  I had to maintain a copy of the original post HTML elsewhere, edit it in a text editor then paste the repaired HTML over the existing content shown in the Wordpress editor.  A rather tedious process.

A little time on Google found some tips that have dramatically improved the quality of automatically generated xHTML:

• Turn off the visual editor in Wordpress: 
  (via Weblog Tools Collection and More than scratch the surface) 
  In Wordpress’s admin interface, switch to the users tab and edit your current user. Uncheck the "Use the visual editor when writing" option.  This resolves the "div converted to paragraph tag" issue mentioned above, and various other errors introduced when Wordpress "fixes" your HTML, so validation errors can now be repaired online.
• Configure Windows Live Writer to publish xHTML:
  (via whateverblog)
  Windows Live Writer did such a good job of detecting my blog settings that I didn’t even think of manually configuring it to publish xHTML.  How embarrassing! In WLW select the Weblog\Edit Weblog Settings menu item.  Open the Advanced configuration options pane.  Make sure "Markup Type" is set to XHTML.
• Be careful where you "Insert Tags"
  If you use the Web Layout view to write your post, be careful where you call the "Insert Tags" feature.  WLW uses paragraph tags and non-breaking space to add blank lines to your post.  If you are not careful you might insert your tags after a non-breaking space on a blank line and inadvertently wrap the tag’s div directly within paragraph tags.  When you validate the results this will be highlighted as an error.

While some errors remain the volume is more manageable (a couple per post) and they tend to be easier to resolve.  The most painful one remaining is the "attribute construction error" but it is looking more and more like this has been introduced by one of the plugins I’m using.  I’ll continue debugging my configuration and report back if I ever manage to track this last major bug down!