Embed multiple Google calendars

UPDATE: 7/30/2009 AM - It appears that Google changed the API and that these instructions do not work as advertised. I will investigate this evening and hopefully post a working solution.

UPDATE: 7/30/2009 PM - I found a solution and wrote a blog post about it.

This morning I am home sick, so I decided to figure out how to embed multiple calendars into my new home page. Some of the instructions are Google Sites specific, but they should be adjustable to whatever platform you are actually using.

1. Go to your Google Sites page where you want to add the calendar
   
2. Click on Edit Page
   
   
3. Select the Insert menu and then select Calendar
   
   
4. For now you can only insert one calendar, so fill out the menu box for one of your calendars
   
   
   
   • Editing the object through this menu box again will write over the changes we are about to make
     
   • I suggest turning off the calendar title, border, and name
     
   
   
   
5. Click on Save in the menu box (A calendar widget should show up now)
   
6. Click on the button for editing HTML (for some reason this takes a while to load)
   
   
7. Open a new tab/window and go to your Google calendars
   
8. Click on Settings
   
9. Click on Calendars
   
10. Click on one of the calendars
    
11. Under the Embed This Calendar section, click on Customize the color, size, and other options
    
12. Under Calendars to Display, check all the calendars you want to display on the page
    
    
13. In the text box under Copy and paste the HTML below to include this calendar on your webpage you have to select and copy some text:
    
    
    
    1. Resize the box (click and drag lower right corner) so you can see all the text
       
    2. Ignore the text up to the second src=
       
    3. Select the text from that point up to immediately before &ctz=
       
    4. Copy (ctrl-c)
       
    
    
    
14. Go back to the tab/window for editing the html of the Google Sites page
    
15. Find the origsrc attribute and select its value
    
    
16. Paste the contents from the Google Calendar text box to replace the attribute value (ctrl-v)
    
17. Click on Update
    

I hope that works for you! In the end, you should have something that looks like mine. You'll notice that the calendars retain their privacy settings from Google Calendar. Most of mine just show free/busy information.

Blog facelift

After some time apart, my blog and I have reconciled our differences and come back together. I doubt this means that I will actually post often or regularly, but it does mean that I spent some time today giving it a face-lift. If you read my posts through an aggregator please actually come by and visit to check out the new layout!

I started out trying to follow this guide for making a three-column blog. Either the guide is out of date or I messed something up because it did not work correctly. It was not really what I wanted either. I like having the option for wider elements up above the two side columns. I found this guide which does exactly that.

I then went through and scrapped all my widgets and elements. That includes the ads. I opened up an old post of mine and followed my own instructions for re-adding things I actually thought added value to the blog. I have not yet added the ads back in. Someday that will happen, but today is not that day.

I then added a couple of things I have been wanting to do. This blog entry talks about adding the digg button below each post (I changed the type to an icon). I also found this blog entry about adding a button for tweeting the blog. So now you can email, digg, or tweet my blog posts!

So this is my new blog layout. Comments are welcome!

Error

Er, whoops! I have been meaning to clean up my blog for a week or two, and I decided to start looking into things this evening. However, I wanted to save the current layout before moving it around. Unfortunately, the button that I thought would save my current layout ended up saving over it. Not exactly what I had intended. My track record for Google products has not been very good of late. I plan to fix the layout soon, where soon is defined as sometime after now.