And Still More Changes

So Google, not content to have killed off my beloved Google Notebook, has now decided to kill off iGoogle.

Now I know it wasn't the most popular of services, but it was useful to me. My iGoogle page has the news feeds from the Washington Post, New York Times, Time, a Weather feed, and a score of other things, including some of my favorite bloggers, like Cletis, Pete, and Fran. I can see what's new at a glance. And now it's going away in a little over a year.

On Google+ I found a post recommending an alternative, Protopage. It looks — well, it looks like iGoogle, really. It even has the ability to add sticky notes, which function pretty much like entries in Google Notebook — unfortunately, the only way to add a new note is to choose Add a sticky note from the Add Widgets tab, but maybe that can be change.

Thanks to our benevolent masters, we have over a year to try out alternatives. Let's see how this one works.

What Google Knows About You

No, this isn't the revelation of any big conspiracy. It's just to point out (i.e., make myself a bookmark) that the page

http://www.google.com/dashboard/

lets you get information about most of your Google accounts, including your privacy settings.

Parsing the Google Calendar XML Feed to Create New Calendars and RSS Feeds

We use Google's Calendar as part of our church web page. It's easy to keep up to date and we don't have to install any special calendar software on our server. It even has an extremely sophisticated XML feed. OK, the feed is considerably shorter, if you tweak the call a bit, using Google's published parameters. You can use this feed in an RSS aggregator, informing your readers about what's happening in the near future. But this might not be exactly what you want.

For instance: It's helpful to have a web-page listing of upcoming events, or a customized RSS feed.

This turns out to be relatively easy to do, if you know the trick,

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