I am pleased to announce the release of the new improved calendar for WordPress, version 1.1. In addition to the previous features the calendar now supports recurring events on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis as well as the ability to specify a time of day for the events to occur. If you are looking for a personal planner for your blog or an events planner for your WordPress powered website you could do a lot worse than giving this plugin a try. You can see it action here or go straight to the download page. Thanks to Richard Brown for providing a financial incentive to code, release and support this improved version.

More news from the facebook development camp, this time with respect to photo uploading on Facebook. So what is it all about I hear you cry, well essentially they have added libraries to the API that will allow software developers to upload photos to facebook from outside of facebook its self.

When I saw this I was quite excited. I’ve long know that a number of my friends read my blog through facebook because it is syndicated there, but conversely do not check out my photo gallery because you have to visit my site directly for it. What these new API libraries would allow me to do is to syndicate every photo uploaded to my gallery into facebook. I would even be able to create galleries with the same name as the ones on my own site.

I’m not sure when I will find the time to write such a plugin for my gallery but if and when I do I’ll be sure to shout it from the rooftops.

Just wanted to put up a quick thank you note for Matt Revell who kindly made a donation to RouterTech last night. He’s a big supporter of open source software and wanted to help out a project close to home. The money will be put to good use in the further development of the project and I’ll be sure to get a credit for Matt arranged on the site.

We’re still making progress! Today the RouterTech team announced the release of the next major version of its firmware, v2.2. There are many great changes and improvements in this version and yet the stability and reliability users have come to expect from our firmware will remain as solid as ever. Existing and interested potential users of our firmware are encoraged to download it from the RouterTech website. While you’re at it, why not help support us and spread the word about quality open source firmware by buying some of our merchandise? Go on, you know you want to.

As ever huge thanks to the devlopment team and others who have and continue to work so hard for the project. I continue to be impressed by your efforts and feel really rather proud to be a part of it all - as my friends will testify, I’m guilty of plugging the project at every opportunity! Hopefully as my schedule frees up in the next week or so I will also be able to spend some more time on the forums and the project in general which can only be a good thing.

Its not usual for me to shout about projects I work on that I’m merely paid to complete and then play no further part in, but I’m making an exception this time.

TheOnlinePhoneBook.com is a special new site that links into Facebook to allow you to recover your phone numbers if you ever lose your phone or SIM card and are left with no way of finding out your contacts numbers.

The way it works is quite simple; Login to the site with your facebook details, save your number, choose who’s number you want and who can have yours. Thats it. Then as the site takes off the number of numbers available to each of us will increase until hopefully everyone will be able to recover their whole phonebook. In just 2 days nearly 200 people have started to use the service and have preferences saved for over 20,000 friends.

Once you’re using the site all you have to do if you ever lose your numbers is just visit the site, login and hit download. You can choose any number of formats to get your numbers in, including vCard which means that for some phones you can upload the numbers straight to the phone in a matter of minutes. I’m not sure how well this site will take off, but one thing is for sure - if it takes off it will be very useful to us all. So, if you use facebook, hop over there now and get involved. Its secure and won’t take a second!

As part of a project I’m possibly going to be working on I started delving into the API for facebook and realised that there are lots of interesting things that can be done with it and all very easily too. Ideas immediately sprang into my head about little widgets that I could add to this site and indeed other sites I run. There is good documentation in the devlopers section of facebook and a handy API web query form to allow you to test API functions and see their output without even opening your text editor or IDE. Sadly though there are two main stumbling blocks with it all as I see it.

Firstly you have to give your consent to allow your details to be used by API developers. Now this might seem good on a privacy level but seeing as its only the people who could view your details if they were logged into facebook who can see them in the API application its a little pointless, and in fact is a little bit restrictive on those who want to take full advantage of viewing thier friends using a more functional interface - how do you easily let your friends know that the fact they haven’t enabled API access means you can’t use this cool new feature?

Secondly you have to be logged into facebook. Now I know why they’ve done this, in fact its almost essential for the security of users data, but it results in some rather annoying restrictions. For example you can’t use the API on a site without a user on that site knowing it links to facebook (simply because they have to login). Further it means that say I wanted to use my login details to broadcast my info from facebook on my own site using the API, I wouldn’t be able to do it (at least not in real time anyway) because the visiting user would need to be the one logged in and then only their details, not mine, would be the “self” as it were set of data. This seems a little flawed to me but there we go.

This doesn’t all mean however that a lot of useful stuff cannot come out of the use of facebooks API. The project I may well be starting soon has the potential to be very handy indeed and will require a minimum of coding work compared with something that was written from scratch. If you are a developer who uses or who has friends on facebook, I’d highly recommend checking out the facebook developers area and having a gander.

It struck me the other day as I was looking at the stats for RouterTech that we really are all over the web. Folk from blogs and forums are linking to us because they find our site and forum useful, and while each link doesn’t attract much traffic on its own it all adds up to spread the word.

Its all getting very exciting though and this month our hits look set to exceed 700,000. We’ve also got a lot of interesting stuff in the pipeline that should be ready in time for Christmas, including some brand new router and networking orientated software from our development team, further improvements to our firmware, more hardware reviews and guides not to mention of course updates to our website functionality, including a bug tracker for our open source projects.

We’ve also got a really cool announcement that we will be making in the near future so stay tuned for that. This is certainly a very interesting time to be a part of the RouterTech team and as ever my thanks are extended to all the team members who literally spend hours of their own time everyday making all of this possible, in particular the development team, thechief and biro - you guys rule.

Last weekend I blogged about a large number of setbacks that had caused my progress to somewhat stall on the development front. Good news, I have managed to resolve pretty much all the problems now so as soon as the modernbill issues can be sorted I’m well on the way to completing a number of really cool projects so stay tuned. I love it when I manage to fix something thats been problematic

I’ve had quite a lot of interest in my events calendar over the last few weeks so I decided to write it up into a proper WordPress plugin that everyone can use should they so wish.

Even though its written for WordPress any coder could adapt this to work stand-alone or with another content management system. You can download it on this page here

Feature List

• Monthly view of events
• Mouse-over details for each event
• User and search friendly URL scheme
• Events can span more than one day
• Multiple events per day possible
• Easy to use events manager in admin dashboard

Right I’m sure many of you don’t even know what modernbill is, but for those that do I’m going to have a little moan about what really should be working in a stable production environment copy of their latest v5.1 release but infuriatingly isn’t

• Importing of TLDs from eNom reseller account - you have to enter every TLD manually at the moment, a total nightmare when there is over 40 to do.
• Disable credit card forms - for sellers who don’t take credit cards and set their admin panel as such still have their clients presented with the ability to pay by and store details of a credit card in the client area. Totally stupid.
• Paypal links to settle outstanding invoices are not included in the client area or on reminder e-mails so customers can’t complete their payments. Sellers go without being payed and clients run up a debt while we wait for modernbill to fix the issue. Doing business is like getting blood out of a stone with this problem.
• Disabling of the FAQ - I have my own FAQ, why can’t I stop the empty one modernbill provides from coming up in the client area?
• Helpdesk integration - v4 handled Intellodesk fine, why can’t v5 do the same instead of just spitting out some message about settings not being available?
• Documentation. I don’t think I’ve ever seen documentation for such a large released piece of software being so scarce. If you are lucky enough to find something in there that even mentions what you are trying to do you can be rest assured that it doesn’t go into enough detail about it to actually be of any use.
• Developers refuse to accept that the above (and other issues) are not acceptable in a stable release of the application

So there you have it - a total disaster. As someone said on the modernbill forums, I feel like an alpha tester here, call this a release version? *sheesh*