Kobi Pinhasov

In my opinion one of the overlooked features in Google Calendar is the ability to receive notifications about upcoming events to your mobile phone by SMS. And all this – for FREE (well it depends on your carrier. My carrier does not charge me for received messages – only for those that I send).

The following is a detailed explanation of how to start using it right now. It will work for Google Apps users as well.

How to set it up

Navigate to your Google Calendar (http://www.google.com/calendar).

• Click on the Settings menu item at the right top corner of the page.
• Click on the Mobile Setup option

• Specify correct values for Country and Phone number (including country + area code)
• Click on the Send Verification Code button
• Check your phone for new incoming SMS messages (for me it took less than 5 seconds)
• The received code put at the field named Verification code
• Click on the Finish setup button

That’s it. You can use this feature right now.

Example

Let’s try something out. Create an new event (click on Create event menu item on the left). Give it some title, set its start time to occur in about 4 minutes and look at the Options section. There you can add several reminders for this event – Email, Pop-up, SMS. Choose SMS option for first reminder and set it to one minute. Click on the Save button. In about 2-3 minutes you will get a notification about this event.

Make it default

For each calendar you can specify its notification preferences. For instance, you night want to receive SMS reminders for each newly added event. To do this, click on the Settings – Calendars.

You will see a list of your calendars (My calendars section). For each one you have a link-like button named Notifications. Click on it. You will be presented will the following page:

In this page you can set up your default reminders. You can have more than one (Email/SMS).

I find this feature very useful. It’s very handy that you can get SMS alerts about your upcoming events when you do not have access to your calendar.

I hope you will find it useful as well.

Related posts

• View your national holidays in Google Calendar

This post will provide a detailed explanation of how to use the plug-in that I’ve recently created Snippets Manager for Windows Live Writer.

File | New

• New Root Category – Create a new category at root level.
• New Category – Create a new – sub category for a selected category
• New Snippet – Creates a new snippet

File | Open

Displays a File Open dialog window to select a snippets file to load. A snippets file is usually a file with .snippets extension

File | Save

Saves currently loaded data into file.

File | Save as

Displays a File Save dialog so user can specify a path to file where all the currently loaded data will be stored (ideal for backup/restore scenarios)

File | Save and Exit

Saves currently loaded data into file and exits the application. Especially useful when managing the snippets.

File | Exit

Exits the application. All the unsaved changed will not be saved !

Tools | Options

Allows you to change the background and foreground colors of the placeholders.

Placeholders

There are cases where you’ve got snippets that you use frequently but require a little bit modification from case to case (maybe changing some title or putting some text). In such cases you can selected the changing area of your text and click on the Mark Placeholder button. The selected area will have it’s own color so it can be altered later. Once you click on the "Send to Live Writer" tab you will have all the placeholders listed there. For each one you can specify the desired text and it will be automatically appended to the source text.

* Place holders can be marked using context menu that appears when right-clicking on the selected text

Example of placeholders usage:

Imagine you’ve got the following HTML code that you put in your posts very frequently.

<a href=’url to file’>Click to download the here comes the app name</a>

We’ve decided that the entire selected area above should be replaced with some custom code when added to any post. To simplify the task, when you click on the "Send to Live Writer" tab it will have field there with title "here comes the app name" and user can specify the text that can be inserted instead of the entire selected area.

Add to post

Saves currently loaded data into file and appends the result to the current post.

Preview output

Click on this link to see the text that will go back to Live Writer.

Compact before adding

This feature enables you to compact the output before sending it to Live Writer – to your post. It removes all the lines, unnecessary spaces between tags and thus reducing the size of the text dramatically. This is very important since your post will be of smaller size and thus decreasing the download time to the client. This way you can format the HTML of the snippet any way you wish so it can be readable for you (by formatting and indenting tags).

current release: 1.0

size: 473Kb

I use Windows Live Writer to write articles for my blog. It’s a very popular tool among other bloggers. Very often I find myself adding the same piece of content to different posts. In the beginning I was just going back to the original post, copying the text that I need and paste it to the new post. I did not like the idea of doing it all the time (waste of time and too much effort). So I’ve decided to create a plug-in that will do this for me – organize my snippets in one place and allow me to add it into any post very quickly.

Main features

• Manage snippets in categories
• Advanced snippet design – allows marking placeholders where custom text can be inserted to
• Familiar and intuitive user interface
• Saving snippets in external file (ideal for backup/restore scenarios) 
• Loading snippets from file
• Quick and straightforward installation process

Since I’m using this plug-in by myself I will keep improving in on a regular basis.

I believe that this is a must have plug-in for any serious blogger.

Screenshots

Download/Installation

• Automatic (recommended)

  Click on the link below to download the setup utility for the product.

  

  current release: 1.0

  size: 473KB

  

  

  
  

• Manual

  You can download the plug-in DLL from below and copy it to the Live Writer plug-ins folder usually found at C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins

  Download the DLL file (48KB): WLWSnippetsManager(1.0).zip

Restart the Live Write application and you will see it in the Insert menu list.

Please refer to the Users Guide for a more detailed information about the product usage.

Leave any comments or suggestions here.

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