If you are a Google Calendar or Gmail user one of the easiest ways to keep track of events for groups and organizations is to create a Google Calendar for each group or blog.  But how do you display these events on your blog?  It turns out this is a little more complicated than I thought.  I have tried a couple of the different plugins but couldn’t get any of them to work.  Here is a look at the plugins and the solution for now. 

Use the Google Calendar Embed Code

Google calendar gives you the code to embed this calendar on your site.  You can set the width of the calendar to fit into the side bar or a page on your website.  You can embed the calendar on a page in your blog.  The code that google gives you to embed the calendar uses an iframe and while iframes are widely used it is better to not use them.

From Web Dev News

Frames and iframes are a bad idea when it comes to accessibility because screen readers can often find it difficult to determine which frame is the main frame and focus can become confused.

Frames can also cause problems with book marking and the accuracy of URLs.

What about the Google Calendar Feed 

Yes, each Google calendar has a feed but if you just display the feed from your calendar in the sidebar of your blog the items will post in the order of which they were added to the calendar, which is not necessarily in date order.

WordPress Plugin Options

Surprisingly there aren’t many plugins listed on the WordPress Plugins page for adding a Google calendar to your blog.  I tried this plug-in, Google Calendar Feed Parser, first and could not get it to work – I am not sure if the issue was that the plug-in is not compatable with my version of wordpress or not but this created a glitch in my code when I added it as a widget and took some work to get things corrected.

Looks Like a Good Choice but Doesn’t Work - WPNG-calendar

This plugin reguires a little bit of extra set up but offers lots of features including a widget and an option to create a page that displays the calendar.  All of the instructions are available on the plugin page and are easy to follow.  I followed all of the instructions but I couldn’t get it to display the calendar.  Looks like I am not the only person who couldn’t get it to work – lots of others have left comments on the WordPress.org forums. Continue Reading »

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

Tracking your traffics is a key part of understanding and improving your website. Google Analytics is a free and easy tool to track your traffic and website statistics. Click here to read the post about Google Analytics.

There are 2 steps to getting started with Google Analytics – 1. set up an account at Google Analytics. 2. Add the tracking code to your website. Step 1 is easy. Step 2 can get a little tricky. In the past I have just added the analytics code to my wordpress theme, but then when I change the theme, I always forget to add the analytics code to the new theme.

A possible solution – A wordpress plugin for Google Analytics - Google Analyticator. The Google Analyticator is a plug that lets you add your google code once and it updates all of your templates for you. According to WordPress.org – 47,000+ people have already downloaded this plugin. I have installed it on this blog and a few others – so far so good.

Here are some other bloggers that have recommended this plugin:

• No Ordinary Homestead
• The Social Web Diva
• John Cow.com

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• Pingdom: 32% of the Top 500 Web Sites Use Google Analytics

Image by AlphachimpStudio via Flickr

Stats and tracking are one of the greatest things about a website.  While you aren’t able to see the specific people who are reading your blog you can use some tools to see things like

• how many people are reading
• what they are reading
• what they searched for to find you
• what links are refering readers to you
• where those reader live in the world

Google Analytics is a free service from Google that tracks these stats for you.

Here is how the blogger, Sargent Grumpy, describes Google Analytics:

It is a software tool that allows you to put a snippet of code on your blog so you can then track your Internet traffic – how many people are reading your posts, which are more popular, how people are finding you. All useful things to know when you are trying to drive traffic to your site.

Setting up Google Analytics is very easy.

1. register with google
2. add a line of code to your website
3. see your stats

Click here to see a detailed look at how to set up Google Analytics from the website Mahalo.

Some other info on Google Analytics:

• description of Google Analytics from Google help pages
• Official Google Analytics Blog

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• The Google Trifecta – The Purple Squirel looks at how you can use google tools to make more money with your website
• Tracking Reactions on the web – Common Craft looks at ways to track how people are following you on the web