Automatic Email Notification of Events
Calendars on the Premium Server or on Merging Servers offer automatic email notification, to a list of email addresses you specify, whenever an event is added or changed.
Calendars Net provides 2 systems of email notification about events:
Notification that Goes Only to the Calendar Administrator
You can make the calendar notify you, the administrator, by email whenever anyone adds, edits, or deletes an event. (Of course, you will continue to control who can perform such functions and can prevent anyone from doing so.) Just go to the Administer/Email Notification menu, enter your email address and check the boxes for Notify on Add and/or Notify on Update. You will then receive immediate email notification whenever anyone adds or changes an event on your calendar.
Notification that Goes to Others
There are 2 separate ways to do this:
- If there is someone who also wants email notification whenever any event is added
or changed, just add that person's email address to the box entitled "My Email
Address," separated from your own email address by a comma. Note that you must not put any spaces between the email addresses; only commas and no spaces. You can use this
to allow users to "subscribe" to your calendar and receive immediate email
updates whenever the calendar is changed. To let users know this is available, you
could put something like this in your header or footer, using your own email address,
of course.
To subscribe to this calendar and receive immediate email updates whenever events are added or changed, contact the <a href=mailto:myname@mymailserver.com?subject=Subscribe to Calendar>Calendar Administrator</a>.
- If you check the box "Forms," an email notification form will appear as part of every form for adding or editing an event. That means that anyone who has authority to add or edit events on your calendar can also decide to email a notification of that specific addition or change to anyone else. This may cause problems, however, because any of your users who can add or edit events can then also send email notifications to people who do not want them. Every notice includes a message that abuse should be reported to Calendars Net. If we get complaints, we will warn the calendar's administrator and may have to disable the calendar if the abuse continues.
Tips
- It is usually best to check the button to send the notification in "Ascii Text and HTML," which does not really include the notification twice but sends it in a form that can be read by both HTML-aware email readers and Ascii text email readers.
- Obviously, in addition to entering individual email addresses in the forms, you can enter the addresses of listserves that you have access to on other systems. For example, if you have a listserve set up at Yahoo Groups, you could enter into the forms "calendargroup@yahoogroups.com" or whatever is the name of your group at Yahoo Groups. Then the notification will be sent to the listserve, for distribution according to the rules of the listserve. Thus, you can use the much more powerful features of Calendars Net in tandem with the listserve feature of Yahoo Groups or Topica or other listserve providers.
What if my listserve only allows members of the list to send messages to the list?
In late May 2000, we changed the "return address" for messages generated by the Calendars Net email system to Notice_Robot@calendars.net, for these reasons:
- We hope this will discourage those who receive your notifications from replying to them. All replies go to Notice-Robot@calendars.net and are discarded.
- This enables you to use email list services, such as eGroups, with the setting that allows members of the list to send messages to the list. Thus, you would make Notice_Robot@calendars.net a member of your list, so that notifications from your calendar would indeed go to your list.
We would prefer that you not include Notice_Robot@calendars.net in your email list. If necessary (see above), please add it to your email list in a way that does not require us to confirm the subscription. If the listserve service you use absolutely requires such confirmation by us, then you must send a separate email to support@calendars.net telling us to scan the notice_robot email account for the invitation.
Adding an Interactive Discussion to Any Event
Another way to create an event and invite users into a discussion is to go to QuickTopic and start a discussion. This takes less than 1 minute, really. QuickTopic then emails to you a link. Copy that link to your clipboard. Then create your event (say, a future meeting). Describe the meeting in a few words in the Calendar Text box, then paste the link into the Popup Text or URL Link box. Then click Submit or just View Calendar. Anyone who clicks on this event will be taken to the discussion you have set up on QuickTopic. See the example every Tuesday in the Big Demo Calendar or just go to the Calendars Net Test QuickTopic Forum. This is a very easy way to get information or comments related to your event.
- An easy way to copy the link from your email to your clipboard is to right click on the link and choose Copy Shortcut (if using a Microsoft product) or choose Copy Link Location (Netscape) or Copy Link Address (Mozilla).
Having Users Bookmark the Calendar: A Caution
You can put a reminder in your calendar's header or footer that users should bookmark the calendar. Note, however, that using the IE or Netscape bookmark features will save the exact URL that the user is seeing. This is not a problem, as long as the user has used the simple link you provided (such as http://my.calendars.net/nameofcalendar). This link will always take the user to your calendar in its default format (block, list, or condensed) and in the current month, week, day, or year (depending you your default viewing mode).
If the user bookmarks the calendar after having navigated to other pages within the calendar, then that bookmark will always take the user back to the specific page where the bookmark was set. If you navigate to, say, a different month, you will see that the URL contains various codes to specify that month and whether the viewing mode is block, list, condensed, etc. A bookmark will save that information and will take the user back to that page, not to the current day's view of your calendar.
Thus, if you ask users to bookmark your calendar, you should explain this to them. One way is to simply refer them to this explanation, which is at http://www.calendars.net/calsetup.htm#bookmark. Or just tell them that the bookmark should not include any codes after the first word after the name of the calendar in the URL.
Adding a Hit Counter to Your Calendar
You can see how many times your calendar is viewed by others by inserting hit counter code in the your calendar's header or footer. Some hit counters will work and other will not. One that appears to work well is Webtracker, and it is also relatively unobtrusive.
Adding One or Many "To Do" Lists to Your Calendar
The Big Demo Calendar shows one way to insert "To Do" lists into your calendar. Just create a periodic event and set it to occur on the first Sunday of every month (Sunday, 1st occurrence of the month). The event text should read something like:
Bob's To Do List
Placing code like this into the box for the event's popup text will create an automatically numbered list of tasks. You can cross out the tasks you have completed by using the HTML <strike> tag.
<ol>
<li> go to the store<br>
<li> get all my work done and retire early to a life of leisure in Hawaii
<li> <strike> bicycle from Hanoi to Saigon</strike>
<li> walk the parrot
<li> <u>this important task is underlined</u>
<li> <i>this important task is in italics</i>
</ol>
Note that the entire list appears when you switch to the calendar's List view.
You can create as many to do lists as you want, using this same method.
What Users Can Do
As a user, you can:
- change the calendar display to Year, Month, Week, or Day
- see the events presented in a list instead of a block calendar format
- start the calendar at the beginning of a month (Abs) or in the current week (Slide)
- search the calendar and display only those events containing the desired words
- permanently save the data in the calendar by going to any month and choosing File/Save As from your browser's menu. That will save that month's data in an HTML file. If you later decide to buy iCal from Brownbear Software and want your raw calendar data file, you can get it with File Download.
Depending on your Security settings, a user can add new events, edit existing events, and administer the calendar (change the settings).
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