Google Calendar‘s feeds are not the most useful in the world. They are sorted by edit date instead of when they’re happening, and they’re only available in ATOM.

No longer. Using the extended feed information Google tacks into their calendar feed it is possible to create a clean, sorted feed with the start date as the pubDate. Just go to the Google Calendar Feed Cleaner and enter the URL to your calendar’s feed, select the format you want (XHTML for testing, RSS 2.0, or JSON(P) ), and enter the max items to be in the results (default 5). You will get a nice, clean feed of your Google Calendar data.

I have released version 0.15 of my YubNub LocationBar Firefox Extension. There are some minor changes to the look and feel (the location bar shows the YubNub URL and icon while processing, and the YubNub icon shows on blank pages). It also extends the local firefox keyword bookmarks to allow for switches. If switches are added to the bookmark’s URL (using YubNub ${name} syntax), then the bookmark will accept switches according to normal YubNub syntax.

Update: I forgot to mention — it also stores up to 50 commands from your command history between sessions now.

So we went camping. No, wait, before that we went on a different trip… aaah… and before that we were at a wedding. I suppose chronological works best here:

Wedding

That’s right, my sissy gotted herself hitched! Half-sister, she’s (understandably) a fair bit older than I am. Been living with the guy for a few years already, but still it’s good to see them make a choice in the right direction and get married J It was nice – only the second wedding I’ve been to since I can remember (although I was to others when I was really little 😉 ). Everyone in the party, except the minister/chaplain dude, wore light colours – bride in white and groom and groomsman and father of the bride in white tuxes, bridesmaids in like lilac and stuff. Dad had his white tux and his electric-blue shades on on the white-sand beach on a sunny day… may that was bright! A semi-traditional style wedding on a public beach is a tad odd, but it was interesting nevertheless. Those who know me know that I’m all for 100% traditional, but unfortunately the groom has little say in how the wedding goes down. He just picks the girl 😉

Trip

So ve vent up to da mid-norvern part of diz here Ontario to visit a Mr. Kewley. And fam. Part of. And friends. Ok, so it was he, his wifus, his son, and two family friends at a cottage on a lake. Interestingly enough, Mr. Kewley found us through dad’s site and this site and Dan’s blog, etc. Contacted us when we got home and asked to meet us. It was fun, we got to go tubing and ride in their boat and build fires (not TOO big 😉 ) and muchos del other fun stufus.

Ok, so I’m not sticking to my writer’s formalities voice today ;P The three young guys spoke on and off in this knockout Scot-Irish accent on and off the entire time we were there, it was pretty funny. Got to the point that for a bit I couldn’t do my Brit anymore! 😉 Oh, and before you start thinking (as you already did) that we just went to visit some wacko who found us over the Internet, he’s actually semi-connected with our mission in a new department their just starting up and so was interested in our work, etc.

On the way out we swung by my Aunt’s place and bumped into the new couple vacationing after their wedding (is it still a honeymoon when you have to drag four kids along?). Lots of fun there visiting and catching up J

Camping

Et viola, we went camping. To a Christian camp with some friends of ours, the Suggitts. If I spelt their name wrong I’m truly sorry, normally I don’t, but for some reason I can’t seem to get it today 😛 Anyway, their family and ours go way back (their oldest daughter visited Daniel in the hospital when he was born… and she was not even a month old!). The week was loads of fun, with me and two of their girls in drama (we did this hilarious rendition of Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednago), Dan in Team Sports (duh), Jess in archery (I guess she liked in) and the other of their girls in Fine Arts (which was really ceramics painting :P). The Bible stuff was good and the activities were well done.

There was one they called ‘Cuban Church’ where you had to try to sneak ‘Bibles’ into a ‘military’-infested forest where you would deliver them to the ‘pastor’. If the military caught you they took your Bible, sprayed you with supersoakers, and started asking you all kinds of questions about your faith. If you witnessed well some of the guards would actually become believers and start helping you. My brother, after a few failed delivery attempts, started just walking up to guards and starting to witness two them. By the end of the night he had twenty extra Bibles (which he got from one of the guards and gave to other to deliver to the ‘pastor’), and two converts. Awesome stuff.

Another great game we did was RISK. Basically you have a certain number of teams (we had four), each with their own colour armband. Each team has to attack/tackle/whatever members of the other team to try to get their shoes off. If you get their shoe off, they remove their arm band and go to get one of your colour, they are now on your team and are trying to get people to your colour. This goes on until everyone is the same colour. Loads of funness 😀

Now we’re back and I’m trying to catch up on stuff, so I’ll talk to all of you later 😉 I’m on Jabber (some may know it as Google Talk) most of the day at singpolyma at gmail.com, and also on MSN/WLM through a transport at that same address. Plus ICQ/AIM at an obscure number I can give you if you ask. Plus email at that address, plus comments here. I’m easy to contact… are you? 😉

Blogger BETA has launched and with it comes many new features and challenges for us as hackers. I’m slow on the draw for this one. I was on a trip when the whole thing came down and am just now catching up. FreshBlog, as always, has the scoop extrordinaire. Much good stuff over there… I wish they had some sort of ‘blogger-beta’ tag for all of it (or tagged it all both blogger and beta) so I could link to the category list (hint, hint 😉 ).

I’m not going to give a rundown of all the new stuff, but instead am going to give a ‘so what’ as relates to my stuff.

Busted Hacks
I’m going to be creating a test Blogger BETA account soon and trying to fix up hacks that don’t work there. However, from what I’m hearing it seems that there is no HTML editing in the new template system, and I don’t want to spend work making the old hacks work on the old template system for the new Blogger (that’s a mouthful!). I’d rather wait until hacks can be implemented in their own right on the new system. More on this when something happens.

Blogger Recent Comments
Is dead. Full stop. No question there. Blogger BETA has comment feeds. I will keep the app running, however, for people who have not upgraded yet (like me!) and just for reference.

FreshTags
Both the main FreshTags and my version are far from dead. Just as FreshTags features are useful on WordPress, where there was already a category system, so they will continue to live on here on Blogger. Since it’s not my baby, I won’t say too much, but we are certainly discussing the best way to move forward in this area. For now, I have upgraded my version to support incoming ?labels= from other blogs, and also to use that locally (still supporting ?tags= from old FreshTags and FreshTags for WordPress). If you are on Blogger BETA and want to use FreshTags ‘as is’ (provided you can get the script to work…) the following code will use the proper label display page instead of the ‘fake post’ for post display:

<script type=”text/javascript”>var freshtags_tag_url = “/search”;</script>

Upgrades to the Greasemonkey script should also be forthcoming.

Update
Have created a BETA test blog and I have a mixed reaction. The new templates interface is nice, and as long as they get HTML editing working for it, it should be über cool. Some of the new button graphics are uglier, and the post published page doesn’t seem to have the details on it anymore (because of the dynamism), which will cause problems for the GM world… the JS/XHTML module funcitonality is nice though — hacks will make use of that! (perhaps even FT?)

A way to organise our microsphere, if only a little. A compendium of blogger hacks blogs. A social blogroll, which can also double as a blogring. A wrink. I’ve created it and put it in my sidebar, you can see it under the heading ‘Blogger Hacks’. I’ve opted to include it in ‘ring’ mode, which means you get next, previous, and random links that let you navigate the list. Click the title to see the full list, or add your own blog.

If you go to the wrink page you can use the ‘Add Site to Wrink’ link to suggest your site for inclusion on the list. It will be help pending my approval, but I should be monitoring regularly for new entries. Then use either the ‘Get Ring Code’ link and select JavaScript (to add it as you see on my page) or the ‘Get Roll Code’ link (again select JavaScript, this will display the full list as a blogroll) and paste the code into your page.

Weekly traffic stats across the whole list will be monitored, and the whole thing is available in JSON(P) format for custom implementations. Drive traffic to your site while also giving your visitors the ability to find other blogs about blogger hacks!

Feature suggestions and bug reports are, as always, greatly appreciated and anticipated.