Using Google Calendar

The calendar you see on the page is powered by Google Calendar. Now that you have a Google account, you can also create a calendar and embed it into your site. How? Let me walk you through it.

1) Create a calendar.
Visit calendar.google.com to create your ministry calendar. Sign in with your blogger username and password and voila, you're in!

2) Share the Calendar
To embed the calendar on another site, you must enable it to be shared. To do this, locate the small arrow next to the calendar name on the lower left corner of the page. Click on the arrow to drop down a menu and choose "Share this Calendar." In the center of the page choose "Share all information on this calendar with everyone." Please note, this will allow the calendar to be searched by Google, so I don't recommend posting personal phone numbers to events--try email addresses if contact information is needed for an event. Lost? Check out the screen shot--just click to enlarge.

3) Add events
Now you can start adding events. Let's say you want to add your Wednesday night program. Just click on a Wednesday, and fill out the information. You can choose to have the information repeat weekly and just go back and delete individual nights off as they come (like Christmas). TIP: In my experimenting I have found that adding an "all day" event adds a nice color bar, while adding a time to the event only adds the event in text (like the Sunday Leadership meetings above). I believe the color bar grabs attention better, so I create a short title, make it an "all day" event and just include the time in the description. As you can see by my example at the top of this page just clicking on the color bar pops up the details. But it's up to you--do what you like!

4) Additional options
Google calendar allows for you to manage multiple calendars in one. Why would you need that? Let's say you have age groups with separate events and schedules, or you'd like to keep your leadership notified of upcoming meetings. To create a second calendar, click on the "Add" button on the left side of the page (see screen shot). Name the calendar, change the shared settings as above, and begin adding events.

Well, that's it for setting up Google calendar. Next post: embedding the calendar in blogger.