I’m upgrading from the Grid services of Media Temple (our host) to the Dedicated services.

If my site is down, this post won’t serve much of a purpose, but in the meantime, it might serve as notice to a few people that might check in before the switch.

woot!

Chad

I was browsing one of my morning links WebAppers.com today and came across a recommended site: The Official “Successful Website Checklist Challenge.”

This simple checklist helps you (as a site owner, developer, etc) determine if your Web site is performing to your expectations, how to improve, and more.

I highly recommend a look-see for anyone that is involved with Web sites. I know I will be adding this checklist (or a bastardization of it) to my new-client sign up process.

I’ve been playing with Delicious Library 2 for a few minutes now (I use it at work to keep a collection of work-based books that I have on-hand for day-to-day use), and I have to say I like what I see.

Nothing really earth-shatteringly new for me (I’m not tracking movie files, games, hardware, or anything beyond my work books), but the “publish to…” actions are making me drool. With a simple two-click dialog, I was able to publish my work library to our local intranet (I have a personal page on our installed Wiki) as well as to my .Mac account.

Here’s a view of what’s in my work library.

Without editing the templates, or choosing beyond the defaults, I have to say the Web publish is pretty nice. I’m going to import some more books I have stored away (week-to-week use I guess?) and see if there’s anything new or exciting about the import process.

Oh, one thing I noticed: There’s an on-launch alert for me to update my PowerBook G4 to 10.5.3 as the graphics enhancements will be slow until I upgrade. Unfortunately, 10.5.3 isn’t available yet! Wil knows about this, however and has posted some tweets about it

Update: November 4, 2008. I’m working on a new post that will include MobileMe, and Google Calendar as possible solutions (and headaches). Once I complete the post I’ll link it up here.

I broke this tutorial out into a separate post from the initial iPhone experience as I wanted to give some new iPhone users (or those that want to sync Exchange calendars to iCal) a quick rundown on what has worked for me.

Here’s a little background:

This past weekend I purchased a refurbished iPhone for $249 from AT&T with no contract. After taking ten minutes to jailbreak, activate, and insert my T-Mobile SIM card, I was up and running.

Now, to fully replace my Blackberry 8700G, I needed synchronized calendars. Since I’m not part of the Enterprise server system at my employer, I must manually dock my Blackberry at work in order to synchronize, so having mobile 2-way synchronization wasn’t an issue for me.

I looked around the Web in order to find a tolerable (and cheap!) solution to the sync problem from Microsoft Exchange to iCal, and then to the iPhone. Nothing really worked for me (at least, not in my “free or less” budget), so I dug a little deeper, finally finding a magical solution that may actually have some greater benefits.*

Here’s what I found:

Snerdware makes a great iCal/Exchange syncing tool called GroupCal (current version is 3.x). While this tool looks good, it does cost +$50 per seat, and I’m a little worried about everything syncing cleanly. Others have had mixed results. If Groupcal works for you, this may be a lightning solution and your search ends there. If not, read on.

After reading Vladisla’s list of options, I couldn’t get anything working. Upon further digging, I found that some users had success with Plaxo. Already being heavily invested in social networks, I decided to give Plaxo a shot (I won’t review Plaxo here, other than to discuss the calendar use).

Here’s what I needed (and did):

I need a way to sync my Exchange calendar to my iPhone with at most the same amount of headache I have with my Blackberry (manually docking to a PC at work, launching the Desktop Manager, and clicking ’sync’).

I thought it would be as easy as Exchange to iCal to iPhone, but of course that’s not the case (duh, I knew that years ago!).

So, if direct to iPhone wasn’t possible, I thought I’d give Groupcal a shot. Now, I mentioned above that this wasn’t going to work for me (two reasons: 1. I already tried their trial a year ago and can’t retry; 2. I am broke). Like I said above, if Groupcal works for you, your troubles are over. For me, it was a no-go.

So, undaunted, I looked at Plaxo. Plaxo allows me to sync from my Exchange (on the PC) to their Web service, and from the Web service down to my iCal (on the Mac). The process took about five minutes total (for login, downloads, and syncing). I have to tell you, once I saw all my calendar events in iCal, and a minute later on my iPhone, I was really stoked.

Let me say this in terms you should understand: I can has calendar? Yes, is mine!

Summary:

Twenty minutes total in the process (about ten to fifteen for searching and trying, and five for Plaxo). Hrm.. maybe I should hit Plaxo up for some sponsorship money?

I’m hoping this post helps at least one person in getting sync’d quickly and easily. Now that I can move calendar info back and forth (not editing on the iPhone, of course), I am a happy camper and think that my migration off of the Blackberry is complete.

Thanks for reading! I’ll try and get some setup screenshots online at some point (forgot to take any on the desktops).

* Caveat: I’m possibly violating some security regulations at work by pushing my Exchange calendar to an unsupported third-party Web service. This taken into consideration, proceed at your own risk.