Here we go Google Sync! Time to see how close we can get to killing off MobileMe!

 

 

Looks great right? One warn­ing caught my eye:

Google Apps user? This ser­vice needs to be enabled for your domain before you can use it. Please con­tact your domain administrator.

K, so I am said Admin­is­tra­tor. What do I need to do here? Please don’t tell me I need to upgrade to a Pre­mium Account, not after all this work Google. Don’t do it to me. Don’t!

Whew!

From: Google Sync via ActiveSync – Google Apps Help

If you’d like to enable Google Sync for your domain, fol­low these steps:

1. In the Ser­vice set­tings sec­tion of your Dash­board, click the Mobile link.
2. Select the check­box next to Enable Google Sync.
3. Click Save changes.

This fea­ture is cur­rently avail­able only in the Next Gen­er­a­tion ver­sion of the con­trol panel.

Did it, done. Whew!

Migrat­ing my MobileMe and Local Cal­en­dars to my Domain-Controlled Google Apps Google Calendar

So let’s start with get­ting my calendar.forsbergville.com Google Cal­en­dar set-up. I log-in and it con­firms the time zone, etc. and bam! Up.

Next I down­loaded a neat tool that basi­cally adds Google Cal­en­dars to your Apple iCal (10.5 and up only) pro­gram. Note that in 10.5 and up iCal, you can also do this man­u­ally as the new iCal sup­ports ical: sub­scrip­tions (love you Apple – had the Kool Aid made into con­ve­nient pop­si­cles and poured into baby bot­tles just so I can be near it more – you rock). The tool was called Cal­ab­o­ra­tion. Any­way, that got each newly cre­ated Google Cal­en­dar into iCal all talk­ing back and forth. Sweet. Next, I exported the cor­re­spond­ing cal­en­dars I already had either on MobileMe or locally into sep­a­rate .ics files vis iCal’s great Export… fea­ture. Once done, I used the Google Cal­en­dar Import… fea­ture and imported to each Google Cal­en­dar cal­en­dar. Again – whew! K, done.

After ver­i­fy­ing that each one looked good in iCal (I should and did have dupli­cates of every item as I should not see the orig­i­nal in iCal as well as the newly sub­scribed to items. I did. Sweet. I delete the local/Mobile me cal­en­dars com­pletely, quit iCal, start it again just to be sure, and walla. Cake.

Migrat­ing my MobileMe and Local Address Book Data to my Domain-Controlled Google Address Book

Will go here – need a break at the moment but will edit this post soon to round it off.

I would like to have inte­grated chat ser­vices on my domain. Users can con­nect via any Jabber-able client and inter­act with friends on other mes­sag­ing net­works (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, IRC, etc.). How? Well, I have already mar­ried a num­ber of sub-domains to my Google Apps account (cal­en­dar, email, etc.) and that’s work­ing awe­some. Now for chat.forsbergville.com. At first I thought I would install a Jab­ber server on my host. Then I real­ized that Google Talk may be able to do the leg-work for me. I can marry chat to Google Talk now, but Google Talk is under-populated and I want those other networks.

Enter the process of fed­er­a­tion. Google Apps Admin Help tells me that:

From: How can my users chat out­side the Google net­work? – Google Apps Help

How can my users chat out­side the Google net­work?
Print

Google makes it pos­si­ble for your users to chat with peo­ple using other mes­sag­ing ser­vices through a process known as fed­er­a­tion. Go to Google Talk and open com­mu­ni­ca­tions to learn more about fed­er­a­tion and who we’re fed­er­at­ing with.

While we’re fed­er­at­ing with a num­ber of other ser­vices, some ser­vices aren’t cur­rently acces­si­ble through the Google Talk net­work, and your users won’t be able to chat with users of those services.

If you’d like your users to have the abil­ity to chat with peo­ple con­nected to the Google Talk net­work through fed­er­ated net­works, you’ll need to edit your Ser­vice (SRV) records. You don’t need to edit your SRV records for your users to chat with other Google Apps and Gmail users. SRV records are man­aged by your domain host. We sug­gest con­tact­ing your domain host to find out if you have access to SRV records and how you can make modifications.

When you enter the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion, make sure to replace gmail.com with your domain. Don’t replace google.com.

_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

Because there are many dif­fer­ent domain hosts offer­ing vary­ing options for SRV records, we rec­om­mend con­tact­ing your domain host directly for assis­tance. This includes enter­ing the SRV record data, assign­ing pro­to­cols and weights, and other con­fig­u­ra­tion ques­tions. Some domain hosts will allow you to copy and paste the infor­ma­tion above exactly as it’s offered while other domain hosts require gran­u­lar data entry.

I use GoDaddy to host both my web­server and domain. This trick is exclu­sively involv­ing the domain. So here you go:

How to Enable Mes­sag­ing Fed­er­a­tion on your GoDaddy Hosted Domain

1. Copy this code snip­pet to your favorite plain-text editor:

_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

2. Per Google’s instruc­tion in the cited quo­ta­tion above, change the “gmail” bits to your domain (Impor­tant to leave the “google” parts intact).

3. Save the file as a plain-text file.

4. Login to GoDaddy, get to your domain’s Domain Man­age­ment area, click “Import” and import the file.

5. Bask in your glory:

Busy installing and test­ing plug-in’s for the blog today. The list is quite large, but I am sat­is­fied that, despite the amount of plug-in’s, I have the bare essen­tials for my design and usabil­ity desires. I snatched a few ideas from this won­der­ful arti­cle as well:

From: The 13 Most Essen­tial Plu­g­ins for Word­Press – NETTUTS

Word­Press is a very pow­er­ful and flex­i­ble blog/content man­age­ment sys­tem, but the thou­sands of plu­g­ins really help to extend the basic func­tion­al­ity. Here are 13 essen­tial plu­g­ins that you should imme­di­ately install after fin­ish­ing the Word­Press installation.

I am test­ing out Mars Edit to blog with. Instead of wait­ing on my server, this lets me com­pose from a nice and slim OSX app. I really like it so far – espe­cially the Flickr inte­gra­tion and great big drop zone for upload­ing pho­tos (not sure if it will do that over FTP as it didn’t ask for ftp info, just a Blog Author which makes me think it prob­a­bly will upload over the blog’s API con­nec­tion – cool!).

I have thrown in a cou­ple images and gotta say, as I write this gets eas­ier and more excit­ing. As a web author, I dig that I can just code html on the fly in this com­po­si­tion win­dow while see­ing a live pre­view of my com­pleted work (sans a lot of CSS styling, but that’s assumed and actu­ally – part of the fun is the antic­i­pa­tion of wait­ing for the post to pub­lish and have that pretty veiner that mag­a­zine writ­ers no doubt feel upon see­ing their work in print).

Yeah, I feel that I am sold on this. I am going to screen cap­ture their web­site (the soft­ware pub­lisher) and then drag the result­ing .png into the drop­zone to see just how cool I hope that this can be…

Fern/Hahn/Vand/Vict Trail Loop — 037

I have been a mas­sive Led Zep­pelin fan since I was weened off breast feeding.  I love to get the Led out, have all albums, col­lect rare vin­tage live record­ings (FLAC or other loss­less only please), run an old­school Car­ra­cho server for said live record­ings, and damn near cried when they had the reunion show in Lon­don and I didn’t have the money to make that epic jour­ney that would, for me, have been akin to an Islamic per­son return­ing to Mecca.  In short: I’m a big Led Zep­pelin fanatic.  In a recent tweet, Will Wheaton wrote:

I’m cur­rently up to Phys­i­cal Graf­fiti, and have just dis­cov­ered that I don’t have the sound sys­tem, ‘69 Nova, or long hair needed to really do this album justice.

I com­pletely got what he was say­ing and twit­tered him back to please elaborate.  He was already on it, shortly after my reply he had already posted this and I thank the gods for another Zep­pelin soul such as this.  Very elegant…

From: WWdN: In Exile: get­ting the led out

Then as it was, then again it will be
An’ though the course may change some­times
Rivers always reach the sea

While writ­ing today, I’ve been rock­ing my way through all my Led Zep­pelin albums, in order. I’m cur­rently up to Phys­i­cal Graf­fiti, and have just dis­cov­ered that I don’t have the sound sys­tem, ‘69 Nova, or long hair needed to really do this album jus­tice, and wail­ing on my desk like it’s a drum kit really freaks out my dogs

Blind stars of for­tune, each have sev­eral rays
On the wings of maybe, down in birds of prey

The sun is set­ting through my office win­dow, throw­ing long shad­ows and golden light across my yard and into my house. The sky begins to darken behind a hazy gauze of clouds on the edge of a storm the weather man says will arrive Mon­day. My sinuses say it is likely to arrive sooner.

Kind of makes me feel some­times, didn’t have to grow
But as the eagle leaves the nest, it’s got so far to go

Ten Years Gone is the per­fect music for this pre­cise, bit­ter­sweet, slightly melan­choly moment, just before the unsea­son­able warmth of the day gives way to the chill of Feb­ru­ary night. I know that, before I even fin­ish com­pos­ing this post, the sun will drop behind the big tree out­side and I’ll have to close up the win­dows and pull on a sweat­shirt. But for now … just for now … I can pre­tend that it’s the end of a sum­mer day, I’m 10 years younger than I am, and I haven’t a care in the world.

Holdin’ on, ten years gone
Ten years gone, holdin’ on, ten years gone

Now for the third and ulti­mately geek point of this post.  I was able to select the text on WWdN, then right-click and quote it (set-up a cita­tion tem­plate) using ScribeFire – a sweet Fire­fox plug-in.  This is  good rem­edy to answer the ques­tion raised in my last post.  I have a list a mile long for enhance­ments and bug fixes, but this would (at least for now) appear to be the only prover­bial game in town for what I need.

Warning: array_keys() [function.array-keys]: The first argument should be an array in /home/content/c/o/b/cobber99/html/eric/wp-content/plugins/devformatter/geshi/geshi.php on line 3643

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/content/c/o/b/cobber99/html/eric/wp-content/plugins/devformatter/geshi/geshi.php on line 3643

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Often, I want to quote (embedded/inline/via a block­quote) all or part of another author’s post.  In fact, in an ironic twist, I will quote regard­ing quot­ing in this post to both show off how I think it ought to be accom­plished and to pose my question(s) (see end of this post).

Tan­tek Çelik wrote:

Addi­tional Thoughts / Improvements

“Wrote” is bad link text. It vio­lates WCAG 1.0 guide­line 13.1 that “link text should be mean­ing­ful enough to make sense when read out of con­text”. Imag­ine the page being pre­sented as a list of links, as many audio browsers, and some visual browsers can (e.g. Opera, Amaya) – a page with a lot of quotes would have lots of links labelled “wrote”, “wrote”, “wrote”. Includ­ing the title of quoted arti­cle gives more mean­ing­ful link text.

Also, WCAG 1.0 guide­line 10.5 offers a hint for improve­ment: “until user agents (includ­ing assis­tive tech­nolo­gies) ren­der adja­cent links dis­tinctly, include non-link, print­able char­ac­ters (sur­rounded by spaces) between adja­cent links”.

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<p>
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   <cite class="vcard">
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      <a class="url fn" rel="met friend colleague" href="http://meyerweb.com/">Eric Meyer</a>
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   </cite>
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wrote in<a href="http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/03/11/social-protocols/"
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rel="cite">Social Protocols</a>:
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</p>
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<blockquote cite="http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/03/11/social-protocols/">
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 What's so interesting to me is that the guys who decided
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 to focus on the positive went out and did something;
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 those who want to mix in the negative seem to have
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 nothing to offer except complaints.
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</blockquote>
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<p>An excellent contrast between those who want to
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build new things and those who want to tear them down.
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</p>

With per­haps a[rel=cite]{font-style:italic} some­where in your style sheet.

So my ques­tion is this: is there an easier/automated way to accom­plish quot­ing in this way?  Per­haps a Fire­fox plu­gin or a web ser­vice that will both gen­er­ate the code and use best prac­tices as sug­gested above?  I want to be able to prop­erly credit the author and enhance my blog post by cit­ing the word, at least in part.  This will take some research as it’s one of those damned hard Google searches (too gen­eral, refers to too many things, etc.).

In con­struct­ing my blog, I came across an impor­tant cou­ple of fea­tures I know I need to enable on my blog.

Firstly, we have Gravatars:

Gra­vatars are Glob­ally Rec­og­nized Avatars. An avatar or gra­vatar is an icon, or rep­re­sen­ta­tion, of a user in a shared vir­tual real­ity, such as a forum, chat, web­site, or any other form of online com­mu­nity in which the user(s) wish to have some­thing to dis­tin­guish them­selves from other users. Cre­ated by Tom Werner, gra­vatars make it pos­si­ble for a per­son to have one avatar across the entire web. Avatars are usu­ally an 80px by 80px image that the user will cre­ate themselves.

from: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Gravatars
So I am enabling the WP-Gravatar plu­gin so that this blog is up to spec socially. Neat!

Next is OpenID:

OpenID elim­i­nates the need for mul­ti­ple user­names across dif­fer­ent web­sites, sim­pli­fy­ing your online experience.

You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most impor­tantly that you trust. At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no mat­ter which Provider you move to. And best of all, the OpenID tech­nol­ogy is not pro­pri­etary and is com­pletely free.

from: http://openid.net/what/
So I am enabling the OpenID plu­gin so login will be a snap. Neater!