• Inspecting the DOM of pages.
• Checking the validity of CSS and XHTML.
• Checking for Javascript syntax errors.
• Breakpointing Javascript.
• Viewing the rendered source of pages.

On top of that, there are a number of other tasks that I do frequently as I develop for the web:

• Measuring page load time.
• Snoop on, and alter, http requests and responses.
• Clear and/or disable the cache.
• Clear all or selected cookies.
• Spoof a site as a different browser.

For all of these tasks, Firefox is the browser for me. There are useful tools for Safari, Internet Explorer and, I assume, Google Chrome, but Firefox with the Firebug, DOM Inspector, Live HTTP Headers, Tamper Data, User Agent Switcher, View Source Chart, Web Developer and YSlow plugins is the set of tools that I am the most comfortable using for these tasks.

The problem usually is that I don’t really want all of these extensions around when I am focused on reading or casually surfing the web. This morning, it occurred to me that I could use the techniques that I used in creating Firefoxen to create a special purpose web application development browser.

A few minutes later:

Here is what I did.

# Make a copy of Firefox
cp -pr /Applications/Firefox3.app /Applications/WebFox.app
 
# Create a new profile, I called mine WebFox
WebFox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -P
 
# I used my existing profile as a baseline, you might not want to
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/
rm -fr 40of1s4x.WebFox/
cp -pr u5qu37ob.default 40of1s4x.WebFox
 
# Change the Bundle Name to "WebFox"
open /Applications/WebFox.app/Contents/Info.plist 
 
# Change launch-ff command to (no quotes) 
# "/Applications/WebFox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -P WebFox"
vi /Applications/WebFox.app/Contents/MacOS/launch-ff 
 
# CFBundleName is WebFox for display in the tool bar
# You probably need the Developer Tools installed for this to work
open /Applications/WebFox.app/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/InfoPlist.strings

Here’s the gist, if you roll that way.

Once you’ve done all that, then you can WebFox (open -a WebFox, or clicking) and modify the extensions to suit your way of working.

That’s it. How it helps someone.

“I want to create a custom launcher for Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 with different profiles. Perhaps the real question is how do we create a custom version of a Mac application launcher, passing in the arguments we need?”

… without having to invoke it on the command line every time.

Mac OS X is assumed.

Firefoxen is an answer in code. It’s a script to automatically configure multiple installations of Firefox so that they open with different profiles. The script encapsulates what I needed to do to figure out how to solve this problem.

The steps are:

1. Modify each application’s Info.plist CFBundleExecutable to point to a shell script inside the application’s bundle
2. Create the appropriate shell script that runs ./firefox-bin -P profile-name in each bundle.
3. Reregister the application’s bundle with launchservices so that the changes are picked up. Normally they are cached.

Only the last of these took too longer to figure out. You can trigger an update of launchservices by renaming the application bundle (Firefox.app => Firefox3.app), but if you rename it back it seems to revert to the previous db entry. (Cached by application name?)

Unfortunately, you can’t combine 1 and 2 either. I tried multiple permutations on changing the CFBundleExecutable parameter in each bundle from the default firefox-bin to something like firefox-bin -P versioned-profile but I couldn’t make it work with any amount of quoting.

Git it here: http://github.com/yesteray/firefoxen/tree

Here’s a screen grab:

Running 4 versions of Firefox.

Here’s the really short story: when you call the insertEvent method, you pass the event that you are creating and optionally, the edit url of the calendar where you want the event to appear. So, to create an event on a secondary calendar, just pass the edit link of the calendar. (You can get the edit link of a calendar in python by calling GetEditLink().href on it.)

For the longer story, I’ll assume that you have installed Python, ElementTree and the Google Data Python Library, following Google’s instructions.

Run through the tests and the sample code. When I ran the calendarExample.py it failed with this stack trace:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./samples/calendar/calendarExample.py", line 577, in <module>
    main()
  File "./samples/calendar/calendarExample.py", line 574, in main
    sample.Run(delete)
  File "./samples/calendar/calendarExample.py", line 498, in Run
    self._PrintAllEventsOnDefaultCalendar()
  File "./samples/calendar/calendarExample.py", line 99, in _PrintAllEventsOnDefaultCalendar
    print '\t\t\t%s' % (a_participant.attendee_status.value,)
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'value'

Since all I wanted to do was to make this sample code run for the single case of adding an event to a secondary calendar, I commented out line 99, but the code should be checking that there is an attendee status before writing its value. After that change the sample code ran fine for me.

To insert a single event in a secondary calendar, I copied calendarExample.py to secondaryCalendarInsert.py. Then I commented out everything in the Run method except this line:

503

    see = self._InsertSingleEvent()

and made the following change,

266
267

new_event = self.cal_client.InsertEvent(event, 
  '/calendar/feeds/g5b79g3f2bi5hc1it41seuu41c@group.calendar.google.com/private/full')

This instructs the InsertEvent method to create the event in my secondary calendar by POSTing to the url of my “Secondary Calendar” (id g5b79g3f2bi5hc1it41seuu41c@group.calendar.google.com) instead of my primary calendar (id default). I found the calendar ID on the calendar settings page of the calendar, but as I said above, if you have accessed a calendar programatically, you can just call GetEditLink().href on it to get the proper link.

You can see that a “One Time Tennis with Beth” event was inserted beginning at the moment I did the insert and lasting for one hour, as described in the sample code.

[Update 2008-11-14: You can't see this if you are using Safari. In general embedded calendar's show in Safari, but there is something about this particular calendar that causes it not to display. Google does a number of separate calls and redirects to obtain the correct data for this calendar and it looks like one of the calls returns data that doesn't correspond to the mime-types. The point that I was trying to communicate with this illustration was that the event did in fact appear and that it was on the secondary calendar.]

On Sep 9, 2008, at 9:05 AM, nadine wrote:
Dear Ray,

I do hope you don’t mind my email you… I am desperate!!!

I work for a gentleman who in turn works for 6 different companies. Because his calendar entries need to be colour coded I have obviously set up a calendar representing each different company which shows a different colour. This works fine between he and I.

However, he would like to share his calendar with a number of colleagues. Do I firstly have to ask each of his colleagues to open a Google account and then do I send an invite to them? However, I think this invites them only to his one calendar and not to all the associated company calendars?

If you are able to advise, I’d be most grateful. I have trawled the net for approx three hours without success.

Thanks,
Nadine

Hi Nadine,

It depends on what you mean by share.

If your employer wants to share 6 different calendars with another person, and that person will have access to add and delete events, or add other persons to those who can view those calendars, he will need to send 6 separate invitations to that person.

If he wants to do exactly the same for a number of other people, then he still only has to send 6 invitations, but include all of the other people.

There are a couple of easier alternatives, though, if the others don’t need to make changes to the company calendars.

You can see one example at my blog, http://67central.com/bc/calendar/. On that page I have displayed 5 different calendars, that anyone can see. These are embedded calendars using the Google Calendar Embed tool to present 5 calendars, all in different colors on a single web page. If you have your own web server or web page, you could add code to a page and your employers colleagues could view it. They could also add the events to their personal calendars.

One small fly in the ointment of that approach is that the content will be visible to anyone which may be a concern, depending on what is on the calendar.

Finally, you can just send the colleagues the private urls for the 6 calendars. On the settings page of each Google calendar, there are 3 links for the “Private Address.” These are links to the XML, HTML, and iCal formatted versions of the calendar. If you send the colleagues the 6 HMTL private links for each color coded company, then the colleagues can view the calendars in their web browser. If you send them the XML links they will be able to subscribe to those calendars in Google and finally if you send them the iCal links, the colleagues will be able to add those calendars to many different types of calendaring software.

I hope that helps,

Ray

In this series of posts, I am going to attempt to provide an answer for using every language that has a client library. I discuss the “official” client libraries for Python, Php, .NET, Java and Javascript as well as the slightly less official Objective-C library and some of the attempts to create Ruby library for interacting with Google Calendar and GData. If there are other client libraries, just let me know in the comments and I’ll add instructions here, or link to them elsewhere as I have time, interest and understanding.

I start with describing how to POST XML to a calendar url. This is “The Protocol”. You should read this information about the protocol, even if you plan to use a client library. Each client library is using this protocol under the covers, so understanding what is happening will help you better use your client library. In addition, I’ll only explain some terms in this section, so you’ll need to read it to understand what I am talking about.

All information in these posts comes from the Google Developer’s Guides, the Client Library Documentation, the source code for the client library and my own exploration and testing. I’ll provide links to these resources in the text as appropriate. For simplicity’s sake, I only cover creating single-occurrence events for users that have properly authenticated using client login. These cases should be sufficient for illustrating how to add to secondary calendars, but 1) I’m not aware of any differences in creating single-occurrence versus quickadd or recurrent events on secondary calendars in any of the client libraries and 2) I haven’t used AuthSub.

I have personally tested all of the code that I present here, unless otherwise noted. That means that I was able to create an event on a calendar using that code. In all cases, I am adding events to my Secondary Calendar which is public, so have a look. I’ll be trying to add an event that occurs at the time when the relevant article is posted.

Here is a table of contents of the language-specific treatments. I’ll update the links as I complete the sections.

Python – Complete September 29, 2008
Php
.NET
Java
Javascript
Objective C
Ruby

The Protocol

To create an event on any Google Calendar you POST the appropriate XML to the calendar’s url. The easiest way to obtain the appropriate XML is to start with an existing event. The easiest way to obtain the calendar’s url, well, that’s a really the rub.

Here’s what Google says about finding the appropriate url:

To post an entry, send the following HTTP request to Calendar, using a special “default” URL (and an Authorization header; see the section on authentication above). Calendar automatically redirects the default URL to the URL of the read/write private feed of the calendar belonging to the authenticated user. (Note that you don’t have to use the default URL to send a POST request to Calendar; you can specify the user ID instead of “default” if you prefer. For more information, see the Calendar feed types reference.)

This is the source of all the confusion on the issue of creating events on secondary calendars.
As mentioned further on after this quote, the “default” URL is
http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/private/full
If you specify the user ID, this would be http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/user@gmail.com/private/full, you get another URL for the user’s primary calendar. You can POST to this url and create events.

The question is, what is the user ID for a secondary calendar? If the calendar belongs to your friend, then http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/friend@gmail.com/private/full works. Suppose that I have created a personal calendar and a work calendar. The user ID for my personal (primary) calendar is my gmail address. What is the user ID for my work calender? My gmail address? No, that is the user ID for my personal calendar.

The problem is that Google doesn’t use the term user ID consistently and what they really mean here is what they call calendar ID in other contexts.

To get the calendar ID, there are a couple of methods.

Google suggests that you parse the calendar ID from the calendar’s edit link in the allcalendars feed. Here is the entire entry for my secondary calendar from the all calendar’s feed.

<entry>
  <id>
  http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/allcalendars/full/2v78cr597kh4kduf3db9t4p1es%40group.calendar.google.com</id>
  <published>2008-09-01T05:24:24.673Z</published>
  <updated>2008-09-01T04:13:31.000Z</updated>
  <title type='text'>Secondary Calendar</title>
  <summary type='text'>This calendar is for testing and
  illustrating the creation of events using the Google Calendar
  Data API on a secondary calendar.</summary>
  <content type='application/atom+xml'
  src='http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/2v78cr597kh4kduf3db9t4p1es%40group.calendar.google.com/private/full' />
  <link rel='alternate' type='application/atom+xml'
  href='http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/2v78cr597kh4kduf3db9t4p1es%40group.calendar.google.com/private/full' />
  <link rel='http://schemas.google.com/acl/2007#accessControlList'
  type='application/atom+xml'
  href='http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/2v78cr597kh4kduf3db9t4p1es%40group.calendar.google.com/acl/full' />
  <link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml'
  href='http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/allcalendars/full/2v78cr597kh4kduf3db9t4p1es%40group.calendar.google.com' />
  <link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml'
  href='http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/allcalendars/full/2v78cr597kh4kduf3db9t4p1es%40group.calendar.google.com' />
  <author>
    <name>Secondary Calendar</name>
  </author>
  <gCal:timezone value='America/Los_Angeles' />
  <gCal:timesCleaned value='0' />
  <gCal:hidden value='false' />
  <gCal:color value='#5229A3' />
  <gCal:selected value='true' />
  <gCal:accesslevel value='owner' />
  <gd:where valueString='' />
</entry>

So, Google is suggesting that you take the element <link rel='edit' ... .> element , parse out the href, extract the calendar ID, “2v78cr597kh4kduf3db9t4p1es%40group.calendar.google.com”, and substitute it into “http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default//full”. That works, but isn’t the most intuitive series of steps.

A more direct way is to just use the src attribute of the content. Since the content of the calendar is empty, Atom specifies that the src attribute must be present, and contain a link to the content. That’s a long way of saying, “This is the link that we want!” To read the content of a calendar, GET the url indicated by the src attribute link of the content. To create an event, POST appropriately formed XML to the src attribute link of the calendar. This is REST 101.

Note that the link in the src attribute of the content is exactly the same as the alternate link. This might be useful information as we work through the various client libraries.

The easiest method is to look it up manually through the UI. In the UI, under the Calendar Details tab of Calendar Settings, there is a section for Calendar Address and included in that section is a parenthetical notation of the Calendar ID.

Note that this is called Calendar ID whether the calendar is the user’s primary calendar (in which case the calendar ID is also the user ID) or a secondary calendar, in which case it is some other user’s email address, or a long string that looks like an e-mail address for an obscure user in the group.calendar.google.com domain, like 2v78cr597kh4kduf3db9t4p1es@group.calendar.google.com. That by the way is the calendar ID in my Secondary Calendar. You can see how Google has used the calendar ID as the src parameter in the link to that calendar, http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=2v78cr597kh4kduf3db9t4p1es%40group.calendar.google.com.

So now the hard part is over. We have the correct url. Here’s the XML that we’ll send as the data in our post request, cribbed from the Developer’s Guide and modified for our purposes. Follow that link for more details about how additional elements will be added on creation.

<entry xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'
    xmlns:gd='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005'>
  <category scheme='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind'
    term='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#event'></category>
  <title type='text'>POSTed XML</title>
  <content type='text'>I was POSTed using hand-crafted XML via the Protocol!</content>
  <gd:transparency
    value='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#event.opaque'>
  </gd:transparency>
  <gd:eventStatus
    value='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#event.confirmed'>
  </gd:eventStatus>
  <gd:when startTime='2008-09-01'
    endTime='2008-09-02'></gd:when>
</entry>

Wrap this up in a script that I have that does authentication and handles the redirects and POST that <entry> to

https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/2v78cr597kh4kduf3db9t4p1es@group.calendar.google.com/private/full

.

Below is Google’s response. More importantly, see the resulting event here. Enjoy.

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<entry xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'
xmlns:batch='http://schemas.google.com/gdata/batch'
xmlns:gCal='http://schemas.google.com/gCal/2005'
xmlns:gd='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005'>
  <id>
  http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/2v78cr597kh4kduf3db9t4p1es%40group.calendar.google.com/private/full/5q38q19h2s756um8902b9f7mrs</id>
  <published>2008-09-01T11:32:34.000Z</published>
  <updated>2008-09-01T11:32:35.000Z</updated>
  <category scheme='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind'
  term='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#event' />
  <title type='text'>POSTed XML</title>
  <content type='text'>I was POSTed using hand-crafted XML via the
  Protocol!</content>
  <link rel='alternate' type='text/html'
  href='http://www.google.com/calendar/event?eid=NXEzOHExOWgyczc1NnVtODkwMmI5ZjdtcnMgMnY3OGNyNTk3a2g0a2R1ZjNkYjl0NHAxZXNAZw'
  title='alternate' />
  <link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml'
  href='http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/2v78cr597kh4kduf3db9t4p1es%40group.calendar.google.com/private/full/5q38q19h2s756um8902b9f7mrs' />
  <link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml'
  href='http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/2v78cr597kh4kduf3db9t4p1es%40group.calendar.google.com/private/full/5q38q19h2s756um8902b9f7mrs/63355951955' />
  <author>
    <name>Calendar Maven</name>
    <email>calendar.maven@gmail.com</email>
  </author>
  <gd:comments>
    <gd:feedLink href='http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/2v78cr597kh4kduf3db9t4p1es%40group.calendar.google.com/private/full/5q38q19h2s756um8902b9f7mrs/comments' />
  </gd:comments>
  <gd:eventStatus value='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#event.confirmed' />
  <gd:visibility value='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#event.default' />
  <gd:transparency value='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#event.opaque' />
  <gCal:uid value='5q38q19h2s756um8902b9f7mrs@google.com' />
  <gCal:sequence value='0' />
  <gd:when startTime='2008-09-01' endTime='2008-09-02' />
  <gd:who rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#event.organizer'
  valueString='Secondary Calendar'
  email='2v78cr597kh4kduf3db9t4p1es@group.calendar.google.com' />
  <gd:where />
</entry>

link rel='alternate' type='application/atom+xml'
link rel='alternate' type='text/calendar'
link rel='alternate' type='text/html'
link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml'
link rel='http://schemas.google.com/acl/2007#accessControlList'
link rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#batch'
link rel='http://schemas.google.com/acl/2007#controlledObject'
link rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#feed'
link rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#post'
link rel='next' type='application/atom+xml'
link rel='previous' type='application/atom+xml'
link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml'

Notes

Alternate links point to an alternate representation of the same resource. There are three types represented in Google Calendar feeds; the type specifies that nature of the alternate representation. The application/atom+xml type alternate links are all contained inside <entry> elements and point to the individual entry. The text/html type links are to html representations of the calendar or event. The text/calendar are links to ics format calendar files.

The edit links are used to update or delete calendars or events. The post links are used to create calendars or events. The edit links are defined in the Atom Publishing Protocol. Post links are Google’s own invention.

Batch links identify the uri for posting batch request. I have no experience with batch requests, but according to the documentation insert, update, delete, or query operations are permitted.

Feed links in all observed cases are exactly the same as the id of the feed. The self links are related to the feed links and id, but also contain the (possibly implicit) url parameters that were used to retrieve the feed.

AccessControlList links identify the location of the access control list (acl) for the feed. ControlledObject links identify the feed that the acl pertains to.

Next and previous specify Atom Publishing Protocol partial collections. Next and previous are paged feeds.