Paul Hubbard at Fnord has written up an awesome new use for FuseCal, which none of us had thought of before- By harvesting the schedules from his local area sports teams and filtering out the away games, Paul has created an iCal feed that roughly predicts traffic congestion in San Diego. How cool is that?
Anyways, Paul explains the steps, essentially giving you a recipe for creating the same type of feed for your town. So, check out his article, and drop us a line to let us know what kind of cool, potentially unexpected uses you’ve found for FuseCal. We’d love to hear from you!
I try my best to keep the FuseCal blog updated with interesting and pertinent tidbits about FuseCal (and calendar apps in general), but some things I want to tell you about aren’t really suited to blog posts, ya know? So, I’ve set up a couple Twitter accounts that should help keep you up to date on the real minutae of FuseCal, in case you’re into that kind of thing.
@FuseCalStatus will contain a blurb about the current state of FuseCal.com. Outages, goofups, mixups, whatever- this is the place to hear about ‘em. Hopefully this will remain a rare occurrence, and the status will remain “okay,” but alpha software isn’t always stable, so we want to make sure you’ll always have a way to know what’s up! (In fact, very soon you’ll see these status in the header of each page on FuseCal.com, so you won’t even have to subscribe to those posts in order to gain from the benefit of all its wisdom.)
@FuseCal has been around for a while, and I use it to sort of keep my finger on the pulse of the online calendaring space. Feel free to DM me there with any calendaring questions, and I’ll try my best to help you out- even if the best solution has nothing to do with FuseCal.
Jon Udell has been posting a great series of tutorials that explain ways to publish events to the web from various calendar apps. So far he has covered Apple iCal, Google Calendar, and Outlook, and it looks like more (possibly Exchange server?) might be on the way… you can follow the entire series of posts here.
This breakdown of moving information from your calendar application onto the web is a great complement to FuseCal’s feature set, which currently has a focus on moving events in the opposite direction. In fact, a number of people have asked us about adding exactly this kind of functionality to FuseCal- We hear you!
Right now, I simply can’t recommend a better resource for accomplishing this task than these tutorials. In fact, Jon’s blog is chock full of plenty more posts that are worth a read for anyone interested in getting the most out of online calendaring. Check it out!
For about 3 hours yesterday (Monday, April 28, 2008), a small number of calendars were inaccessible inside FuseCal. In fact, if you logged in during that time, it would have appeared that the calendars had disappeared. The truth is that we accidentally deleted them while performing some fairly routine site maintenance. Since we made a backup of the database right before starting that work, we were able to restore everything very soon after we became aware of the problem.
We’re really sorry about any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused you. We believe everything to be back to normal now. Please let us know if you’re having any remaining issues!
Thanks a lot for using FuseCal. We appreciate your time and attention, and we’re working hard to make it as useful as possible.
We’re back from yet another awesome trip, this time to O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Bill, Mike, and I had an excellent time and met a lot of really great folks. Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth in the the Long Tail Pavilion!
One crew we met out there were guys from Angelsoft, who were going from booth to booth recording 1-minute video pitches from the various startups. I think it’s awesome how they’ve created a record of some really new companies… Doubtless, within a few years, some of these have the potential to be pretty big names, and you’ll be able to look back and see them at a very early stage. For context: what’s the oldest video you can find online of Larry and Sergey talking about Google?
Here’s the pitch I gave them. I think it came out pretty good, although I had no idea I moved my head so much when I talked. Weird. Anyways, let me know what you think!
This may be a month on the late side, but I’d be remiss if I never posted anything about our trip to SxSW. The short version is that Austin was a total blast. Tibet and I had the most ridiculously awesome time, and met all kinds of high quality people. Frankly, it was such an obnoxiously amazing time that I’ve been putting off writing about it - I had no idea where to start!
Fortunately our friends from Batch Blue were kind enough to document some of FuseCal’s SxSW saga to video. Thanks to Michelle’s expert documentarian-ship, I can just let my talking do the talking… Did that makes sense?
With no further ado, allow me to present:
FuseCal.com’s sad SXSW tale
It’s true - Delta temporarily lost a very important bag of ours. But I like to think we made the best of the situation, inventing the “shitty card” in the process.
FuseCal.com has a fancy SXSW booth
We were on such a roll with the “shitty cards,” that we had to up the ante just a little…
Believe it or not, the self-awarded Fanciest Booth prize may have been our greatest asset at the trade show. Folks in the SxSW crowd generally had great senses of humor, so I think this was actually a really remarkable way to make an impression and start a conversation, which of course led to talking about FuseCal.com.
On the last day of the trade show, the SxSW organizers were even cool enough to announce over the loudspeaker that FuseCal.com had won the Fanciest Booth award, making the title almost-kinda-sorta-quasi-official. Sweet!
Who needs schwag or a big marketing budget when you’ve got notebook paper and tape?
I’m heading down to Austin tomorrow, to make a fashionably late appearance at SxSW Interactive. Ahhh, I can’t wait!
I’ll be meeting fellow FuseCal’er Tibet Sprague, who’s already down there, rocking the scene. (If you see a tall hippy, be sure to say hi.)
Sunday through Tuesday, you can visit us at table 707 in the trade show. We’ll be showing off FuseCal, looking for user feedback and good conversation. Come talk our ears off about calendars or your pog collection… It’ll be fun!
I can’t believe how long it’s been since I posted, but it’s all with good reason… We’ve had our heads down, cranking out the next release of FuseCal, which is set to come out on February 1. This will include some new features, which I’ll tell you more about soon, as well as a bunch of under-the-hood improvements to make everything faster and more stable. Many thanks to everyone who has already taken FuseCal for a spin and given us feedback… I hope you’ll like what we’ve been cooking up!
On a side note, I’m very interested in talking to folks who build web mashups. Bonus points if they use any event data, and/or you live around Providence. (Note: Points not redeemable for cash.) Drop me a line if you’d like to talk shop.
Incidentally, the RI Nexus calendar is probably the best source of tech sector events in the greater Providence area. So, after you read about us on their blog, you might just want to pipe their site into FuseCal… how meta is that?
