At church and youth we have several rosters in excel for keeping track of who’s doing what and when. I’ve wanted for a while to make a rostering app that would automatically create a roster, assigning a set of users to different tasks at different frequencies for a set period of time. Additionally having it online could be people could automatically be notified of changes and provide an iCal feed.

In the end though I realised that after uploading an excel spreadsheet to Google Spreadsheet, a program could be written to produce an iCal feed for iCal / Outlook / Google Calendar / Thunderbird (via Lightning) / Sunbird, and it would save a lot of time. So that’s what I’ve done an you can download it here.

Installation:
1) Setup you spreadsheet in Google Docs
2) unzip ical.zip and upload it to your webserver
3) Edit config.php and add your username, password named range / event start times and spreadsheet key
4) Subscribe to your calendar!

Demo:
There is a demo calendar set up based on this spreadsheet. Click the link, or copy and paste the URL into your calendar application, espeically if you’re using Google Calendar. The single entry configuration is available here:
http://jameslow.com/content/software/ical/
And an entry that produces multiple iCal events per spreadsheet row here:
http://jameslow.com/content/software/ical/?sheet=MultiEntry
Help and version information is avaliable here: http://jameslow.com/content/software/ical/?help

Notes:
Uses the Google GData PHP client: http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/articles/php_client_lib.html
And Flaimo’s PHP iCal library: http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/873.htm

FAQ:
1) Named Ranges
- Sometimes google doesn’t return data from named ranges correctly, its recommended to use a specific ranage eg. A1:C20

Change Log:
1.3
- Add calendar title
1.2
- Group similar items
- Link back to spreadsheet
- Fix to show all dates
1.1
- Fix for PHP on some systems
1.0
- Initial version

YouTube Feed is a plugin that allows you to embed a youtube video with a blog post, and have it show up as a link url when imported into your Facebook notes.

More info here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/youtube-feed/

Most of the desktop applications I’m working on are based around a crossplatform java template that I’m writing, that basically makes java applications feel as native to the user as possible. It also has a sophisticated Ant build build file that provides automation for a lot of tasks including creating of exe or app files and uploading to google code and sourceforge.

I’ve released the first version of the the template over at google code.

Haha, two ‘work’ posts in a row!

As some of you may know, wordpress 2.6 broke podpress, the great podcasting plugin for wordpress. There were several ‘fixes’ that people found after, but basically all of them involved disabling revisions in the new version of wordpress. I then discovered this forum topic that showed how wordpress called the ’save_post’ hook in the new revisioning system. The solution I came up with allows you to keep the revisioning system turned on, but still allow podpress to work.

Instructions (Podpress 8.8)
1) Download this file.
2) Rename to podpress_admin_class.php and copy it to your /wp-content/plugins/podpress directory, replacing the existing file.
3) Create a post and check it works

Instructions (Other versions)
The above file might work with other versions of podpress, but it might not. It would be better to edit your own podpress_admin_class.php file to ensure things work.
1) Edit /wp-content/plugins/podpress/podpress_admin_class.php
2) Replace the line function post_edit($post_id) with the following:

function post_edit($post_id) {
if(wp_is_post_revision($post_id) || wp_is_post_autosave($post_id)) {
return $post_id;
} else {

3) Scroll down to just above the function edit_category_form($input) {
4) Insert another } above it to close off the condition statement.

Things that should be noted:

I use wordpress 2.6 on all of the blogs I maintain now. I love it, I love the new file uploads that were introduced in 2.5, and the post revisions from 2.6. I use wordpress on some intranet pages along with allow categries and private files to control access to sensitive information. The new revisions work great because in a world of non-techsavy users, if we need to go back and fix something that someone broke we can, or for writing online documentation, it means you get a complete version history.

Ok, if you subscribe to my blog for personal reasons, this isn’t very relevant to you, but for those of you here for the programming, on a recent project I had some problems getting the BIT field in MySQL to be interpreted as a boolean in PHP. There are a couple of discussions on the net about it here and here, but I couldn’t find any simply stated solutions on the net. So here’s what I ended up doing. You can also download the file here, rename the file .php to use it.


function mysql_bit($bit) {
return ord($bit) == 1;
}