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it’s easy once you know how.

Creating Outlook Calendar events through hyperlinks

Posted by James - 07/08/08 at 11:08:02 pm

You mightn’t think it was possible, the lack of implimentations you see for it on a day-to-day basis, but actually you can create Calendar events for a wide range of email / organiser clients using the iCalendar file format.

From the users’ point of view, your Calendar event appears as every other hyperlink does in your html pages – but when they click on the link, instead of being taken to a new page, Outlook opens up an ‘add event’ just as if they’d clicked on a meeting request (in Outlook).

From the developers’ point of view, once you have your server configured correctly, it’s just a case of creating and linking to an .ics file instead of a .htm file – at which point the client’s email software should take over.

Does it work for me?

I don’t know – try clicking on this link.  If MIME types are incorrectly set you’ll probably see a plain text file, and if you don’t have an application setup that’s compatable with iCalendar events, you’ll probably just be asked to save the file to your hard drive.

Continue reading Creating Outlook Calendar events through hyperlinks…

XSLT and RSS feeds.

Posted by James - 31/01/08 at 12:01:58 am

XSLT is XSL Transformations, and XSL is Xtensible Stylesheet Language. (So says w3schools)

XSLT is pretty impressive. With a single stylesheet you can completely reformat XML data into a HTML structure that suits your needs. Even better than that, you can also use quite complex commands to single out specific peices of data. This gets me thinking – RSS feeds are XML based – and RSS feeds are often formatted in the ugly default method of the browser. So why don’t people use XSLT to completely refactor their RSS feed data, not least to maintain a bit of branding consistancy. Continue reading XSLT and RSS feeds….