Google Calendar is a great cloud computing calendar solution which allows you to manage your calendar online, as well as invite others to shared events.

One feature Google Calendar is missing though is the ability to delete more than one event at a time. However, by using the remote calendar functionality Google Calendar offers, you can get around this.

(This solution uses iCal on OSX but you could use a similar approach with GooSync for Outlook if you’re on Windows.)

1. In iCal, select Preferences from the iCal menu.
2. Go to the Accounts tab and add a new account (+)
   
3. Select CalDAV from the Account Type then enter your Google username and password.
4. Enter the Server Address as google.com.
5. On the Server Settings, make sure the Server Path is set to /calendar/dav/[username]/user where [username] is your Google username.
6. You have now configured your Google Calendar to sync up with iCal.
7. If you have a mass of events with similar content that you need to remove, search for that term eg. “Morning Meeting”.
8. Select all the events and delete.
9. When iCal synchronizes with Google Calendar, all those events will be removed.

WordPress is quite a popular open source CMS that is often praised for its ease of use and simple installation. Like most open source applications, WordPress tends to have upgrades every few months to improve security, stability and the underlying framework.

In recent versions of WordPress, this process has been extremely easy with an automatic upgrade system (something that has also been integrated into the plugin framework too) but on older versions, the process wasn’t particularly straight forward.

Thankfully, I found a rather useful set of commands that you can run on your server via SSH to make this process extremely simple.

Disclaimer: I recommend you always take a backup of the database and working folder before running these commands in case something goes wrong. 99% of the time, I’ve not had any problems with this process but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

# Get the latest WordPress version available.
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

# Uncompress it.
tar xfz latest.tar.gz

# Delete the old wp-includes and wp-admin directories.
rm -rf ./wp-includes/
rm -rf ./wp-admin/

# Go to the new Wordpress directory:
cd wordpress/

# Copy the downloaded files to your existing WP install, overwriting any old files.
cp -rpf -f * ../

# Remove the uncompressed and downloaded files.
cd ..
rm -rf ./wordpress/
rm -f latest.tar.gz

# Visit your blog and upgrade the database (if needed).

Make sure you visit your WordPress installation in the browser straight away to run any upgrade scripts that are required. You should only see one screen and that process is complete.

The Apple OSX bevelled effect isn’t exactly original now but, nonetheless, there are times when the style suits your design needs, especially when wireframing OSX/iPhone applications.

I’ve found a neat little method of creating the bevel effect in Fireworks which you can reuse quite easily:

1. Select the object you want to apply the effect to. (Note it works best on darker objects).
2. Apply a drop shadow filter to the object (Filters > Shadow and Glow > Drop Shadow).
3. Set the Distance to 1, Opacity to 20%, Softness to 0, Angle to 270 and the Color as #FFFFFF.

That’s it! See the following example of how it looks.

For added convenience, why not set this as a favourite style?

1. Select the object you’ve just applied the filter to (it should be the only filter applied).
2. Click the + button next to Filters.
3. Select Options > Save As Style….
4. Name the style, something like “OSX Bevel“.
5. Now you can apply the bevelled effect to any object you select in Fireworks by clicking the + button and choosing “OSX Bevel“.

Hopefully some of the designers out there will find this little tip useful.

If you can think of a quicker or more convenient way of applying this effect in Fireworks or have an alternative approach for all the Photoshop users out there, leave a comment below.

Sometimes, you want to use an RSS feed as a data source. This may be for publishing on your website or for mashing up data with another service.

Recently, I’ve been building a corporate intranet with the functionality to embed RSS feeds within the content. It’s a great way of generating fresh content in a controlled environment with minimum effort. Unfortunately, there are quite a few RSS feeds which include embedded links for sharing the item via services like ShareThis or Feedburner’s FeedFlare. One such example was the Post Online RSS Feed.

This seemed like an ideal job for Yahoo’s Pipes to tidy up. Here is the process I went through to create the sanitized version:

1. Create a Pipe on Yahoo Pipes (you may need to sign in with a Yahoo! account).
2. Drag Fetch Feed from Source on to the canvas.
3. Enter the URL of your feed.
4. Drag Regex from Operators on to the canvas.
5. Select the item to sanitize, e.g. item.description.
6. In the replace text box, enter <(.|\n)*?>.
7. Leave the with text box empty.
8. Check the g checkbox.
9. Drag a connection from the bottom of Fetch Feed to the top of Regex.
10. Drag a connection from the bottom of Regex to the top of Pipe Output.
11. To test your Pipe, highlight the Pipe Output box and check the results in Debugger panel at the base of the browser.
12. If all has gone to plan, you can Save your new Pipe, give it an appropriate name and start using your new clean feed.

Hopefully, you’ll find this useful. If you do, leave a comment below. Equally, if you encounter any issues with the process, share the problem and how you may have fixed it.