james low

I’ve been looking for a spreadsheet widget for dashboard for along time, something to quickly blot without loading up a full spreadsheet like open office, excel or numbers. I was thinking of writing my own, but I’ve been trying not to program so much “pointless” stuff and focus on what really matters. This lead me to the idea of using Mac OSX’s webclip feature that lets you create a widget from any webpage.

I originally tried Google Docs with a public spreadsheet, but something went wrong with the javascript. A quick wikipedia and I discovered Zoho’s public spreadsheet. It worked great as you can see from the image!

Just a quick note saying I’ve released a REST library that I’ve been using in some of my work. There currently exits a version in PHP and Java and it signs the POST parameters with a key, so that you can be sure of client authenticity:

http://code.google.com/p/randr/

I was writing a program and needed a Java class that would read some text a line at a time but also tell you what the last line seperator was, whether a line feed, carriage return or both. It was written very quickly, and may not be perfect, and it requires a java.io.Reader in the constructor that returns true for markSupported()

You can download it here: SmartBufferedReader.java

I spent some time fixing some bugs in my facebook comments wordpress plugin. It uses a lot of regular expressions to scrape data from facebook. Regular expressions can be a real pain to get working, but I recently found this website that helps you test them in PHP:

PHP regular expression tester

This is also useful:
Regular expression cheat sheet

Just blogging and saying thanks for everyone that’s downloaded one of my plugins for wordpress. Its made me the 352nd most popular plugin author by number of downloads.

http://4webmasters.nicuilie.eu/2008/12/top-1000-wordpress-plugin-authors/

Been helping Janakan a bit with his great new app found at www.youtubeapp.com. Its awesome and you can really should check it out.

Things I love:

• Seeing everyone’s libraries, you get to find great videos AND its really interesting seeing how it reflects different things about someone’s personality.
• Auto playing next video, this is great, because you can use a search or setup a playlist and it just keeps going.
• Facebook integration, this is great because facebook is where I go to find out what my friends are doing. I don’t have most of them added as friends on youtube as well.
• Drag and drop, just rocks

Post ToDo is a modification of Our ToDo list with the ability to attach a to do list to a post or page and some additional options.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-todo/

Installation
1. Download post-todo and place in wp-content/plugins/post-todo
It must be in exactly that place to work:
wp-content/plugins/post-todo/post-todo.php
2. Log into your WordPress admin panel
3. Go to Plugins and “Activate” the plugin
4. Add a todo list to a post by just inserting the tag [post_todo]
5. You must be logged in to edit
6. Display all todos from all posts using [post_todo_all]

Todos for Post ToDo
[post_todo]

3rd Party Authentication is a wordpress plugin that allows wordpress to authenticate against other authentication systems. These include:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/3rd-party-authentication/

Known Issues
There is a known issue related to the google login, sometimes it requires the user to enter a captcha (one of those pattern of fuzzy letters), especially if a user types the wrong password. At the moment the plugin doesn’t handle this, and may stop the user using this service. You can fix this by going here: https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha

Change log
0.2.3
Fix so auto creating users populates email field allowing more than on user to be created! Thanks Cody!
0.2.2
Added text on login page to indicated regular logins work
0.2.1
Bug fix for when using default port
0.2.0
Remove blank from the list in 0.1.7
0.1.9
Fix for if wp_authenticate already declared
0.1.8
Added google apps domains to the list
0.1.7
Shows a list of domains that can be logged in using
0.1.6
Can now auto create users

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, especially if you’re using Google Calendar. The single entry configuration is available here:
http://jameslow.com/content/software/ical/?sheet=TestSheet
And an entry that produces multiple iCal events per spreadsheet row here:
http://jameslow.com/content/software/ical/?sheet=MultiEntry

Help
Help and version information is avaliable here: http://jameslow.com/content/software/ical/?help

Item query
You can query for calendar events from just a specific user or item name listed in the spreadsheet by specifying this on the URL: http://jameslow.com/content/software/ical/?sheet=MultiEntry&item=James

Multiple sheets
You can query multiple sheets by using the [ALL] tag: http://jameslow.com/content/software/ical/?sheet=[ALL] or doing a comma separated list of sheets: http://jameslow.com/content/software/ical/?sheet=TestSheet,MultiEntry. These values can also be used in the $DEFAULT_SHEET param in the config, to make these the default available at the root URL.

Test
You can run a test on any sheet by suffixing test to the URL. This will not redirect to an iCal file, so you can see any errors in your setup. It will echo the number of iCal events created if successful. http://jameslow.com/content/software/ical/?sheet=MultiEntry&test=1

Username
The username / password used to access the spreadsheet can be left out of the config file (global and sheet) and specified in the URL so that the data is not public: http://jameslow.com/content/software/ical/?sheet=MultiEntry&[email protected]&password=password

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
2) Outlook / Windows support
– Outlook 2007 natively supports subscribing to iCal feeds. For windows you can download Windows Live! Mail. For outlook 2003 you can use the free Remote Calendars add-in and for Outlook 2000/XP this commerical add-in.

Change Log:
1.4
– Query all spreadsheets and multiple spreadsheets using [ALL] or comma separated list of sheets
1.3.1
– Add some explanation to config file
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