Update: Here is the best way to sync Google Calendar & Thunderbird. Works like a charm.

Getting Things Done (GTD) is very popular these days and people are always looking for an easy way to save another minute. With that in mind, I’ve found a simple way to view my Google Calendar in Thunderbird.

Step 1: Go to your Google Calendar page, click on the down arrow next to the calendar you want and choose ‘Calendar settings’. If your calendar is shared, right click non the blue HTML button in the Calendar Address area and copy the link location. If your calendar is not shared, right click on the blue HTML button in the Private Address area and copy the link location.

I’ve been using Google Reader for about a month or so now and the transition to it has been pretty good. It’s got most of the features I want and works quite well. I think Google has a ways to go on it yet, but so far it has turned into my default feed reader.

Here are my likes:

1. It’s web based so I always have access to my feeds.
2. It has a simple and clean interface.
3. No Ads.
4. When you scroll past an item, it marks it read. Other readers mark all items read one you open the feed.

I can’t say I was ever a big fan of Google Reader, it was just a little to weird for me. However, the new Google Reader seems to be more advanced and much nicer. I’m actually quite digging the simple interface, nice layout and the stared or shared items.The only thing missing is browser integration. I’d love to have it work with Firefox’s sidebar. I like my browser integration to much to navigate away from Sage (or Flock’s feed reader).

Another thing I’d like to see are feed fav icons. Flock has them and it’s really nice.

Humm… much like most of my problems, once I complain about them, they get solved. So here is what I learned about Google Calendar.

My public WebDEV calendar just needed time to refresh. A good hour or two and Google loaded it no problem.

My FTP calendars loaded just fine once I removed the robots.txt file. I was was protecting them from search engines as I don’t need my calendars showing up in search results, but, I now realize that it also blocks the Google calendar bot from picking up my ics files.

I’m not sure if it’s just me or not, but I can’t seem to get Google Calendar to work well with Apple’s iCal. I have FTPed my calendars up to a folder on my website, pointed Google Calendar to those ics files and yet, nothing shows. I’ve even published my iCal calendars on a public WebDAV server, then put the URL into Google Calendar and nothing shows.

What gives? Is Google calendar and Apple’s iCal not compatible?

I’ve stumbled across exclusive pictures of Jeeves the butler back at Ask! Is his retirement over?

I guess the man has been interviewing around as I also spotted him at Yahoo!

Checking out Google, I found that they interviewed Jeeves but have gone with Mr. T. That’s right, only the best results fool!

By now, you may feel my exclusive pictures are, um, fake. Well, not everyone is happy to see Jeeves go. So, with a little bit of code, you can add Jeeves back into Ask.com. Or add Jeeves to Yahoo, Mr. T to MSN, Sponge Bob to Google or a banana to Ask. Whatever you’d like.

Hosted on Zooomr

Well Lycos is the newest contender in the competition to win over your email business. So, jumping on the bandwagon, I gave Lycos Mail ago. Overall, it’s nice, but lacking.

The interface looks really nice. It has a good color scheme and an up-to-date graphics. However, the graphical ads kill it. It tarnishes the nice look and feel horribly. However, if you block ads, I guess you could get past that. You could also pay for email and then the ads would be removed too.

I wasn’t to interested when I read about Yahoo Answers launching, but after trying it, I’m very impressed.

Not only is Yahoo Answers easy to use, it also gives very good answers and the turn around is anywhere from a few minutes to a day. I’ve asked two questions, one on cats and one on Windows, and both had excellent outcomes. Each question was answered and my questions were solved.

Google Desktop has a fun sidebar feature that can be used to show off Google widgets. However, this is only available on Windows.

Erica Joy (I think she works for Google) figured out a simple work-around. Well kind of.

Since Firefox can load any web page in the sidebar, she said that you just have to put all your favorite widgets in the left column of your Google personalized homepage, then bookmark it, get the bookmark properties and check the ‘load in sidebar’ box. That’s it.

It’s simple, it’s easy and yet none of us thought of that. Check out Erica’s blog for more detailed information.

I’ve been playing around with Google Analytics’ goals recently and I don’t quite get how they work. They sound easy enough, but yet, they are very confusing.

For example, when you add your goal, it says e.g. http://www.mysite.com/thankyou.html. But on the ‘My site’s pages are dynamically generated. How do I set up funnels and goals?’ page it shows www.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1 (no http://) and on the expressions page it shows www\.google\.com.

So which is it?

Also, on the expressions page there are 11 expressions available. However none of them have a very good examples or explanations. I guess if I were a hardcore programmer these would make more sense. But what about for the more average person?