Tech Geek

If you've been around the Lutheran church for awhile, you've seen the Augsburg Fortress Little Red Books. They are the smaller cousins to the Thrivent Big Red Books, also known as the Lutheran Pastor's Desk Diary. Go to a meeting of any Lutheran clergy and you're sure to see someone reach into their shirt pocket or briefcase and pull one one of these Red Books out to scribble a note or write down an appointment. Both of them have info about the lectionary texts assigned for each Sunday, which saints go with which days, and when Easter and Ash Wednesday actually fall this year! Both of them are very paper based, and not all that useful for people like me, who haven't used a paper based calendar in over 15 years!

Today I received this tweet from @bethalewis: Free downloadable "Little Red Book" is available for 2010. http://www.augsburgfortress.org/redbook/ (Beth is the CEO of Augsburg Fortress, along with being a wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, sister,  and KY Wildcats basketball fan.) I didn't think I'd have any use for a downloadable book, then my curiosity got the best of me, and I clicked the link.

Augusburg Fortress has provided a DBA and a CSV file that can be downloaded and used within Palm Desktop (DBA) and Microsoft Outlook (CSV). There is a helpful link for additional instructions on how to insert the dates into either of these software programs. Great! But I use Google Calendar. Can I use them too? Yes!

I downloaded the CSV version of the file to my computer and saved it on the desktop as Year_C_2010.csv. I opened my Google Calendar and Click Add --> Import calendar at the bottom right of the Other calendars box at the bottom of the left column. This brings up a new window which asks for the file name (the Year_C_2010.csv file I just saved) and what calendar I want to import the file into. I used my daily calendar. After clicking the Import button, I waited a few seconds, and then my calendar had lots of new entries. Some of these are duplicates to things I'd already put there, but most of them are new entries. You could also create a new calendar (before starting the import process) and import all of these dates to that calendar, if you wanted to keep them separate from your regular events.

Updates:
Paul Amlin has provided this comment below, but so you don't miss it, I'm moving it up here.
Hey gang, for the mac users out there who are google challenged or don't use that amazing tool, but who wish to use the LRB calendar in iCal, I've converted an iCal friendly version and posted it for download on my website: http://www.paulamlin.com/downloads/ This has been a popular request by many on the facebook group I admin, hope it's helpful to others here as well. peace, Paul :o)

Beth Lewis, who I mentioned above, also posted some more information on her blog, available at http://blogs.augsburgfortress.org/?p=210 .

Thanks to Rev. Matthew A. Smith (Bethlehem Evangelical Lutheran Church, Lansing, MI) for compiling this information for us into the Downloadable Little Red Book.

A quick update to last week's post. If you wondered (or are still wondering) what Twitter is, check out the short film at http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter . The Common Craft folks have done an excellent job of explaining what Twitter is and why you might want to use it. They have some other great videos there as well!

This week I want to take a look at badges that you put on your blog or website to show your online status or latest status updates. I don't have much of a blog myself, but I'm going to point you to it so that you can see what I'm talking about. Visit http://pastorandy.blogspot.com/ and look at the right column which updates dynamically depending on what I'm doing online.

At the top of the column, underneath my profile, you see my Facebook Profile Badge. This is a small bit of HTML that I pasted into a section on my blogger page. To get your own, visit http://www.facebook.com/badges.php while you're logged into Facebook. There you create your badge and get the HTML that you will paste onto your site. There are options for vertical and horizontal badges displaying as much or as little information as you wish. It's all updated to reflect your latest Facebook status.

Next you'll see the Twitter Updates section. I have this set to display my last five Twitter updates, which are also my last five Facebook status messages. To get this one, I visited http://twitter.com/badges/ and clicked the appropriate links to get a badge for Blogger.

The Online Status section contains my Skype, Yahoo Messenger, and Google Talk badges. They're all clumped together because I was tired of adding individual sections!

The Skype one comes from http://www.skype.com/intl/en/share/buttons/ where you enter your Skype username and choose a button type to get the HTML code. I like the one that shows my online status to blog visitors.

The Yahoo Messenger one comes from http://messenger.yahoo.com/addpresence.php where you put in your Yahoo ID to get the HTML code.

Finally, the Google Talk one comes from visiting http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New while logged into Google. You get the HTML code and paste it in.

I haven't had too much of a problem with extra SPIM or SPAM from these badges, but if you're nervous about putting your Skype username, Yahoo ID, or Google ID out on the web, you might not want to use these features.

This week I received the following question: Have you figured out how to have Twitter actually change the status on a Facebook page? Yes, I have. That was an easy one to answer. I suppose the questioner wanted a bit more information than that. I use a combination of Google Talk (Instant Messaging ), Jott, Twitter, and Facebook to keep my friends and youth updated.

The first key is getting your status updates into Twitter. There are a myriad of to do this. There are at least these methods:

• from and SMS message on your phone
• from IM
  
• from your logged-in home page (on Twitter)
  
• from m.twitter.com (via your phone)
• from Jott (via your phone)
  
• from a large number of third party applications at http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps - be warned, there are a lot of them!

Once you've got your updates to Twitter, you need a way to synchronize them to Facebook (and other places). The application that I've been using successfully to do this for the past few months is called TwitterSync. Once you update your Tweet, it magically updates your Facebook status in a minute or so. You can use any verb you want, not just "is" and you can even keep your Tweets password-protected if you don't want the general public to follow you. It automatically filters out side chatter (@ messages on Twitter) and you can also set it to filter out and exclude Tweets that have certain words in them.

In order to set it up, visit http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=6009973148&ref=s and follow the instructions there. Basically, you need to add the application to your Facebook account and also set up your Twitter account to have cnySrettiwT follow you. Once you do this, it seems to work pretty reliably, but some users have noticed times it doesn't update.

I'll also remind you again of Jott as a great service for those of us who don't have the SMS typing skills down as well as most of our kids. Once you sign up for an account, you can send messages to a wide variety of web services. Jott transcribes the voice message into a text message and send it on. You can send Tweets, add Google Calendar appointments, add Remember the Milk tasks, and a whole bunch of other things too.

Next week I'll spend some time on how to put your Facebook Status, and other messenger status, on your blog or webpage.

What are you up to? Whatcha doing? Busy? I was late to the whole blogging game and late to the mini-blog game as well. I've been playing with Twitter for just a short amount of time and I find it an interesting exercise in sharing what I'm up to throughout the day. Sometimes I only update it once a day and sometimes more frequently. Probably no one even cares! But maybe there are folks in your youth flock that do find it interesting.

Twitter is a service that lets you post mini updates about life from the web (www.twitter.com), by e-mail to a special address, from your phone via SMS or mini-browser, from a Google Desktop Gadget, and probably a bunch of other ways that I have not yet figured out. Each update can only be 140 characters long, but you can post as many of them as you wish. You can also set up people that you want to follow and see their updates in a variety of ways. This is somewhat interesting, but what I was really interested in was ways to post a single update and have it show up in multiple places.

I only update my blog every once in awhile, when I have something I feel like updating about. But, by using the Twitter Badge for Blogger, my Twitter updates are shown right on the blog. So there is at least something new! To add that, I logged into my Twitter account, then went to http://twitter.com/badges and installed a badge on my Blogger page. You can also add badges for MySpace, Facebook, TypePad, and just about any other site.

I also added an application called TwitterSync to my Facebook page. This copies my most recent Twitter update to my Facebook status. The official Twitter/Facebook badge is supposed to do this, but I have heard people had problems and I've had better luck with TwitterSync, available at http://apps.facebook.com/twittersync/ while you're logged into Facebook.

Don't forget, if you have questions or topics you'd like me to address, e-mail at techgeek@elcaymnet.org