Daniel E. Renfer’s Blog

I am still in search of the optimal way to keep the tools I use for contacts and calendars and mail and feeds in sync with each other. It’s a daunting challenge. I have yet to find a very good solution, but I’m going to describe some of the tools I use to try to do this.

Gmail

I’m actually using the Google Apps for Your Domain, but it’s close enough to being GMail for me. GMail’s support of the IMAP protocol makes using a desktop client to read my email easy.

Thunderbird

My email client of choice. For a long while, I was simply using Gmail’s web interface, until I decided that I wanted to get myself a PGP key and start signing my outgoing messages. Enigmail makes that easy.

Lightning

A plugin for Thunderbird. This gives me my calendar in the same program I read my email.

Outlook

I wanted to give outlook a try. I wanted to like it. I used to use it for work. It supports IMAP. Unfortunately, I found it to be way too slow for my tastes. I could jump from message to message in Thunderbird way faster than I ever could in Outlook. Still, I need it if I want to synch my contacts and my calendar to my Creative Zen Vision:M.

Chandler Hub

I needed an online place where I could send my calendar. I am constantly running the latest nightly build of Lightning, thanks to the nightly updater, so the Provider for Google Calendar wasn’t working for me. Also, GCal doesn’t support To-Do’s. Chandler Hub was the best service I have thus found that would allow me to do a 2-way sync of my calendar.

Plaxo

A great service. They have plugins for both Outlook and Thunderbird. This keeps my address book in sync between the two, as well as several of my other online address books. Unfortunately, Plaxo for Thunderbird doesn’t sync my calendar. If they did, I could probably get rid of a lot of the other tools I use.

Schedule World

This is a new service I have been trying. Thunderbird syncs it’s calendar with Chandler. Outlook syncs with Plaxo. Outlook won’t read Chandler properly, so I had no way to get the stuff in my calendar over to Outlook. This is where Schedule World steps in. I have been having a little trouble getting it to synch my calendar with Outlook, but it is doing the To-Do’s fine.

It has now taken me 3 days to get this post written, so I’m going to stop right now. There are other links of my chain of getting things synched, but they are not as important as these pieces.

Do you have a suggestion for a tool that helps you stay in sync? Feel free to contact me.

Every day this week I have been forcing myself to get up at 07:00. Naturally, I am somewhat of a nocturnal person, left to my own devices, the time I go to bed will get progressively later and later. Combine this with the fact that I have been unemployed for approximately the past 8 months, my sleeping schedule has fallen into what is "normal" for my body. The only limiting factor in this equation is the fact that I have two small children.

Toby has actually gotten pretty good at going to bed at a decent time. He used to be pretty much of a night owl, but (thanks to the efforts of my wife) has been managing to go to sleep at a normal time for a 2 1/2 year old boy on most nights.

Then there is Random… Much like her brother when he was younger, she tends to stay up fairly late. I am pretty good at getting her to sleep by standing up with her and rocking her, but that does not always work. I can only hope that in time, we will be able to get her to bed at an earlier time.

This will become very important to them as they get older and start going to school. I have always felt that school starts entirely too early. I understand most of the reasoning behind it. They try to get the kids to school before their parents would traditionally have to go to work, but it was always so early. I have always felt that my grades in school would have been better had I started even 2 hours later. Then again, maybe I should have just studied harder.

I will be starting my new job this coming Monday. I will be required to be in Ann Arbor by 8:00. My current wake time of 7:00 most likely won’t be sufficient. I plan on eventually pushing my alarm clock back another half hour tomorrow to get my body used to being a morning person once again. Once I have acclimated to 6:30, I’ll probably push it back again to 6:00. That should give me plenty of time to lollygag before having to go to work.

Today I made the decision to move a lot of the content on my site into WordPress using it’s "pages" feature.

Previously, my site was separated into two sections. My WordPress blog, and everything else. At one time, I had my blog matching the theme of the rest of my site.

When I updated my install a while back I pretty much lost that. Considering that I hate the visual look of my site as it is, I didn’t feel the overwhelming desire to bring down the prettiness of WP’s default theme with my horrid artistic sensibilities. So now I have the task of copying and pasting a bunch of text from my custom PHP content management system (if you could call it that) into WordPress’s online page editing page.

I was really hoping that Windows Live Writer would give me the ability to compose and edit pages in adition to blog posts, but as far as I can tell, I don’t believe they do.

In other WordPress related news, I’ve updated the template to create better RDFa for this site. I don’t know exactly how many other sites out there give the complete SIOC information for their blog in RDFa, but this one does. I’m actually not sure how good my attempt at RDFa is. I use an extension for Firefox called Operator. It’s a really great program for identifying microformats in a page, but the current release isn’t fully updated to the new RDFa spec. Because of that, I can’t tell if some of the things I’ve tried to do (like using @instanceof) are actually producing the desired triples.

Did I mention that at least some of these pages should be showing up as hAtom enabled? Well they are. I really wish that WordPress would include a lot of this stuff by default. I’ve been thinking of taking my changes to the default install of WordPress and publishing a patch file that people could apply. If there is any interest out there, let me know.