web

We're talking about calendar management at work so I got to looking around at the iCalendar standard and its use. What I learned is that I am way behind the curve on this topic and that people have put some fantastic tools in place already.

Over at netvibes.com they offer a little portlet through which you can subscribe to different calendars offered in iCal format.

Google Calendars offers the ability to subscribe to external calendars in addition to those of other google users.

Outlook can handle individual iCal files, but using an extension called Remote Calendars I read about over at Wikipedia's article on iCalendar, you can subscribe to calendar feeds as well.

Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog is the closest I have come so far to reading a definitive site on the subject of this new web application design philosophy known as Web 2.0. The days of static web pages with links and buttons is being overtaken by pages that come alive kinda like the programs we began using before the web emerged, but in a new massively connected way not possible before it did.

Even though Microsoft is finally getting around to releasing a version seven of their Internet Explorer browser, most of the recent innovation has been taking place with the freely downloadable Firefox browser. The main feature Firefox brought to the mainstream and that IE7 will be offering is tabbed browsing. With a tabbed browser, you can open new browser "windows" in the same window but with the page title appearing in a tab instead of the window title bar. This makes it really practical to switch between multiple web pages simultaneously without spending all your time finding the right window on your task bar.

Beyond tabbed browsing, Firefox has captured a significant share of the browser market by offering programmers the ability to extend its functionality through add-ins they call Extensions.

Here are some of my favorite Firefox Extensions and why:

Jakob Nielsen, the father of the science of web usability, has just released his second review of intranet portals and found that products and usage are still lagging behind what we know about them. Learn, then do, would be a good guiding principle, it appears.

Ruby on Rails sounds like a promising web development framework, though I know nothing more than the

For people who aren't ready for serious web design work but need a flexible and useful place to edit web pages without knowing HTML, the NVU (prnounced n-view) web editor is the ticket. You can't go wrong with this free tool, and you can run it on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Read what some others say, then start to use it yourself!

When I got my first invitation to use Plaxo from a relative of mine, I was suspicious. Any company that was offering to help me manage all my contact (and calendar) information at no charge HAD to be up to something no good. Well, I've been using it for about 6 months now and I am absolutely sold!!! Basically you install a Plaxo program on your computer that copies your contact data up to your own private space on the Plaxo server somewhere in the sky, okay I mean Internet. The first benefit is that you just created an off-site backup copy of your contact data!

This site is built using Drupal, a powerful, flexible, and free system aptly described in this discussion as a web content management system toolkit. Architecturally sound, highly flexible, well-supported, and accompanied by a rich collection of available modules, you can do just about anything with it!

I'll never fly to Australia to participate in a conference on Web Technology, but I might download mp3 recordings of the sessions! I think this podcasting concept is pretty cool one!

The relative irrelevance of the operating system and the emergence of rich web-based interfaces using technologies such as AJAXi cause me to conclude that this article predicting the emergence of Google over and above Microsoft is not just blowing smoke. Desktops won't exactly go away tomorrow, but WHICH desktop, laptop, or other device you use will matter less and less. Good news for Linux, bad news for Microsoft, to name an obvious example.