The Adventures of Systems Boy!
del.icio.us has suddenly, and for no apparent reason, begun sorting my bookmarks in reverse order. Of course the sort order always seemed completely arbitrary and impossible to configure anyway, but still I got very used to clicking things in that certain, screwy order. And now it's backwards.
Um... What The Fuck?... I'm irked.
Anyone know a way to sort del.icio.us bookmarks in some logical order, once and for all? Please. I'm begging.
There are a couple more new and improved features of Google's Blogger Beta, which this blog now uses, that I just wanted to mention because they're really quite cool.
The first new feature is the "Search This Blog" feature. This has been around since I've been using Blogger, so it's not really new per se, but its implementation is. The search field can be found at the top of every page of every Blogger blog. In the past it used Google's Blog Search, which is both currently in beta, and currently seriously broken, which is big reason I've switched to Blogger Beta. But now it seems to use some kind of internal search magic. Now when you use it you're no longer transferred to a Google Blog Search page, but instead get the search results right from within the blog itself. This is brilliant and beautiful, and it's the way it should be.
The second very new feature (like, as of maybe last week) is a back-end deal, but it's incredibly useful to authors. In the Post Manger you get a list of all your posts, ordered by date. But now, for the first time, you have some options for viewing this list. Of particular interest to me is the ability to view posts by Label. Blogger has not only leveraged their new Label feature in the front-end, but very smartly in the back-end, and it's just one more pleasant surprise that's making my blogging life that much easier, and encouraging me to stick with the Blogger system.
I have to say, there's nothing quite as impressive as a beta that works significantly better than its stable counterpart. I've had no troubles and gobs of joy from this Blogger Beta. Of course, now that I've said that out loud I should expect everything on the site to go instantly and irretrievably wonky. But until then, my hat's off to the development team for Blogger Beta. You guys are kicking some serious ass. Thanks!
So a lot of people are familiar with my articles on publishing iCal calendars to the 'net with box.net. But it turns out that I also have to provide iCal publishing for staff on our internal network, and I do this using a Mac OS X server. Recently, after rebuilding my server, I had some problems with it and had to set it all up again after not having done it in quite some time. It's pretty easy, but there's one snag I got hung up on. We'll get to that in a minute. But first let's run through the steps to set this up. First and foremost, setting up iCal publishing on Mac OS X Server requires the web server to be running. This can easily be done with the flick of a switch in the Server Admin application. But before we start the service, let's make all our settings. The first thing we need to do is set the root folder for our site. Now in my situation I'm not actually doing any web serving. All I'm doing is calendar serving, and only on our internal network, and that's all I'll describe here. The standard site root folder in Mac OS X Server is /Library/WebServer/Documents. To make things a bit cleaner and easier I'll put all my calendars in a subfolder of this called "calendar," and since that's all I'm serving I'll make that my site root: /Library/WebServer/Documents/calendar. I've given my site a name — systemsboy.com — and manually set the IP address. Otherwise I've left everything alone.
Server Admin: General Web Settings
(click image for larger view)Next up we want to set some options. WebDAV is, of course, key to all this. Without it the calendars can't be served in a form we like. So turn on WebDAV. I've also left Performance Caching on and turned everything else off. Again, this is just for serving calendars.
Server Admin: Web Options (click image for larger view)
Finally, we need to set up our "realm" which is a place where WebDAV/calendar users can share files. To do this, first add a realm to the first box on the left there by clicking the big plus sign beneath it. Give the realm a name, and give it the path to the calendar folder we set as our site root. I am just using "Basic" authentication as this is only going on our internal network and security isn't a big concern in this instance. Once your realm is set up, save the changes and then add some users or a group to the boxes to the right of the realm box. In my setup I added a group called "icalusers" which contains all the users who need to and are permitted to share calendars. I've set the group to be allowed to browse and author. This is necessary for users to read from and publish to the server respectively. You can do the same with individual users in the upper box. Once you've got that set up, save your changes and start the web service.
That's pretty much it, except for one crucial thing: permissions. I always seem to forget this, but permissions on the calendar folder must be properly set. Since WebDAV permissions are handled by the web server, the proper way to set this up is to give the user that runs the web server ownership and read/write access to the calendar folder. In most cases that user is called www. It's probably a good idea to give group ownership over to the www user as well. So before this will work you need to run:
sudo chown www:www /Library/WebServer/Documents/calendar
To set the ownership to www, and:
sudo chmod 770 /Library/WebServer/Documents/calendar
To give said user full access to the folder. [Updated to reflect user comments. See note at end of article for details. -systemsboy]
Once that's done, just start the web service in the Server Admin application by selecting the "Web" service in the far left-hand column and pressing the big green "Start Service" button in the app's toolbar. You should now be able to publish and subscribe to calendars on your Mac OS X Server from iCal. The publishing URL for my example would look something like this: http://systemsboy.com
And subscribing to the calendar, where "Birthdays" is the calendar name, would look like: http://systemsboy.com/Birthdays.ics
Simple, right? Yeah, I thought so too. Just watch those permissions! Bites me every time.
NOTE: I had originally reported that permissions for the calendar folder should be set to 777. A couple readers pointed out in the comments section that this is not the case. I have edited this article to reflect their suggestions which are a much better solution than my original one.
Thanks, guys, for pointing that out! Really good to know!
The latest crop of Google gadgets, gizmos and services are really pretty damn cool. I've just been playing around with my customized home page, and there are a whole bunch of things I can load there. Things that I might otherwise choose to view via widgets — like the weather, for instance — or things I might turn to a desktop application for — like RSS feeds or email — can be consolidated into one page, or a series of tabs on that page — that page being my Google home page — right inside of a very familiar and ever-handy interface — that of the browser.
Ultimately, one might suppose, the browser via my Google home page, would become my one-stop shopping spot for everything information-centric. I just open my browser, go to my Google home page, and everything I need to know on a daily basis is right there. My mail, my calendar, the sites I regularly check, are all represented and visible at-a-glance on one page. I can chuck iCal. I can chuck Mail. I can chuck NetNewsWire, and WeatherDock, and all these little apps I have that tell me all the tiny little things I need to know on a daily or hourly basis. Yes, with all this power one might suppose that Google would become my home page. But one would be wrong.
You see, despite the fact that I can — today, right now — leverage all this information right from my Google home page, I simply never do. In fact, I don't know anyone who does. And I have some theories as to why. First and foremost, I think the main reason I don't currently do this is because of design. Google's design is notoriusly butt-ugly in general. And in the case of their home page, it's also just not very usable. In fact, I'd say it's a really good example of poor design hindering usability. Here you have all this information, all in one spot. It's a veritable cacophony of information. And this cacophony begs for good usability design. Google has given us the ability to move modules around, and add tabs for additional organization and module storage, but... That's about it. There's no way to customize colors, or font sizes, or borders, or anything that would make that abomination of a page usable. Is it potentially useful? Yes. Is it usable? Not for me or anyone I know.
Personally, when I look at my Google home page I get a headache, and I immediately begin craving individual, specialized applications, particularly well-designed ones that organize information in ways that make parsing that information pleasant rather than a chore. I'm no design expert, and I'd be hard-pressed to come up with serious suggestions as to how to better design an application towards usability. But I know bad design when I see it — or when I try to use it — because, ultimately, I don't use it. I can always tell a badly designed app, because I just don't want to use it, no matter how useful it may be.
Back when Google was "just a search engine" the minimal attention to design was fine. But now, in these days of "Web 2.0" apps, design becomes essential to how we collect, organize and process those vast amounts of information that Google has so brilliantly given us such seamless access to. The presentation of data is as crucial to understanding that data as collecting it. Google needs to really start thinking about this if they want people to start using their apps to the extent that I think they do. For the Google home page to become truly usable, design will need to play an essential role.
