I’ve managed to somehow make it my business to know whats going on in the local industry (and beyond), but in regard to local events, I have a lot of events and groups to keep up with. I still haven’t streamlined that process, though the combination of Google Calendar synced with ical over SpanningSync sure helps a lot. I tend to distribute “things going on this week” via twitter, email groups, and various IM conversations, it’s hardly efficient.

Well, I’ve decided to take a plunge into ultimate transparency. I’ve decided to feed by personal google calendar over the web, and it’s now available to be viewed and subscribed to at http://www.dangerouslyawesome.com/calendar/.

I haven’t gone back and set visiblity permissions on past events because, well, they’re in the past. But moving forward you may see “busy” blocks on my calendar. Those are things that I’m decidedly keeping private…whether to protect other parties involved, or for safety of my own sanity :-).

In general though, all of the groups, meetups, and events that I attend, plan to attend, or hear about that I think are worth attending (even if I can’t make it) will go into this calendar.

If anyone has a particularly handy way of projecting this information better, please speak up in the comments, I’m open to suggestions. The benefit to google calendar is it’s portable and subscribeable, as far as I can tell. And doing this doesn’t disrupt me existing workflow while it (I hope) adds value to some of my readership, especially the Philly folks.

Tags: calendar, shared, transparency, public, events, meetup groups, philadelphia, independents hall

A common request that I get with a lot of the non-profit or foundation work that I do is to have a donation button. Previously, PayPal was the way to go, since they had a donation button maker. The downside was, that paypal takes a cut on your donations unless you jump through some hoops to become a registered “foundation”.

Recently, Google Checkout has rolled out and has some rather enticing features…besides integrating their single sign-on checkout procedures, invoicing, and a bunch of other handy things…for the entire year of 2007 they are offering card-processing with no fees. Thats right…no fees. All of 2007. Nice.

Before I go on to listing my hacks, I do have one small request…I’m building up a referral base and if you have any intention of signing up for a new google sellers account, please consider using my referral link if the info below has helped you (or anything else ive ever posted has). it’s much appreciated, and I get a kickback on your sales (.5%). Full disclosure. Sign up here to use my code.

On to the help.

So…Google Checkout, like most of Google’s other services, has a pretty extensive API and code example library. Sometimes, though, you’re not looking for full integration. You just need a simple donation button where the user can specify any amount.

Or maybe a “buy now” button with a quantity…for tickets, for example.

At first glance…the Google Checkout buttons won’t let you. They only supply 2 options…buy now with a fixed price, or buy now with a drop down of pre-set prices.

So how did I build the buttons above? Using the HTML API. But before I could get started…even the demo code was screwing up with my Merchant Key…because I had missed one tiny setting.

This one’s important.

Under Settings->Integration, there is a checkbox that stops anything but digitally signed XML cart posts. While this IS an important security feature…since you arent posting any secure information via the HTML API, you’re safe enough to allow unsigned posts.

From there…just follow the example listed here on the API help guide. Using the first code block, replacing the dummy merch key with your own merch key should be enough to get it working. Assuming you can post the “chunky peanut butter” demo to your account, you’re ready to move on.

The next step is to make some modifications.

Here’s my ticket-purchase with quantity box code:

<form class="gcheckout" method="POST" action="https://checkout.google.com/cws/v2/Merchant/[[merchID]]/checkoutForm” accept-charset=”utf-8″>
<input type=”hidden” name=”item_name_1″ value=”Martini Tasting Cocktail Benefit”/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”item_description_1″ value=”Join Us for an evening of food & fun Martini tasting & silent auction at the Flanders Hotel.”/>
<label>Quantity:</label><input type=”text” name=”item_quantity_1″ value=”1″ id=”qty”/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”item_price_1″ value=”3.99″/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”_charset_”/>
<input type=”image” id=”submit” name=”Google Checkout” alt=”Fast checkout through Google”
src=”path/to/submit button” />
</form>

And here’s my donation button code:

<form class="gcheckout" method="POST" action="https://checkout.google.com/cws/v2/Merchant/[[merchID]]/checkoutForm” accept-charset=”utf-8″>
<input type=”hidden” name=”item_name_1″ value=”Quintin Foundation Donation”/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”item_description_1″ value=”Thanks for your donation. Every little bit helps!”/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”item_quantity_1″ value=”1″ id=”qty”/>
<label>Donation Amount: $</label><input type=”text” name=”item_price_1″ value=”" id=”amt”/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”_charset_”/>
<input type=”image” id=”submit” name=”Google Checkout” alt=”Fast checkout through Google”
src=”path/to/image/btn_donatenow.gif” />
</form>

At this point you should notice some differences between the demo code and mine. First, the form action is now posting to the actual cart form rather than the sandbox (i bypassed the whole sandbox thing since this isn’t a full e-commerce integration). Replace [[merchID]] with your own ID (and drop the angle brackets). I added the class gcheckout to the form tag for formatting purposes. Also, set the path of the input id=”submit” to your submit button graphic.

All of that leadup, and the trick itself is actually very simple!

The core pieces to making this whole thing work are the inputs, which, in the demo code, are all set to hidden. It’s very simple to change the type from hidden to text, and make them user-editable. By placing a label in front of them, and a little bit of styling, you get some pretty swanky buttons with user-input flexibility.

All of the customizable input fields are detailed here. This should allow you to specify shipping details, tax details, and many other parameters…depending on the needs. And remember…so long as you keep the “name” property, you can switch to a dropdown or a multi-select box…allowing you to create some fairly robust button codes!

Oh..and for debugging? Go back to that integration place (where you unchecked the shopping cart post security box) and check the log. It’s pretty useful when google checkout chucks a fairly nondescript error for the user, but lets you track down problems.

TAKE THAT PAYPAL!

I’ll come back to this post in about a week when we’ve launched the site that I figured this out for, so you can see the code in action.
Check things out at http://www.quintinfoundation.com. Note, that we were asked by Google to take down our donation button until there was some tax-related information squared up. More on that issue to come.

Tags: google checkout, donation button, HTML, API

tabs are all the rage. i dont really know why, they are a UI convention that has the potential for helping keep things organized but…it also can get confusing and unruly fast (ever run firefox with too many tabs? yeah. no good.)

anyway, i just noticed that google customized homepage now has tabs, a-la netvibes.

thanks google, more stuff on my search home to distract me from my work :-)