I just completed a web design project for 24/7 Tutor – a new Gainesville-based tutoring service for UF students. They let students call them literally 24 hours a day for tutoring in a growing list of difficult classes…

The site’s back-end is run by WordPress – I am very happy with using it as a complete, but cost-effective, content management system (CMS) solution. The back-end is not fool-proof (lot’s of things to click) but certainly is not too difficult for most clients. Most importantly, being able to take advantage of a such a well-written, open-source solution enables clients to have a CMS with little additional cost.

In addition to using WordPress, I integrated a Google Calendar, allowing the company to add events to a good-looking calendar easily through Google’s existing calendar website. Even more exciting is the fact that users of the site can then “subscribe” to the calendar, or copy specific events to their own personal Google Calendar.

Google Calendar is officially my second most-relied-on service by Google (search is #1, personalized home is #3). Even though it does have its share of problems, I now rely on it to pretty much run my life, since I switched from Outlook Calendar a few weeks ago.

Hopefully John, Tom, and Maxim from 24/7 Tutor are happy with the site – and hopefully it will bring them a lot of new business.

Edit: someone asked me if there’s really that big of a market for personal tutoring for a University. There certainly is. TutoringZone currently dominates the market I believe (although with a crappy web design), TutorGator looks like they just ripped off Facebook’s site design, and I know there is at least one other company.

Update: Google responds.

Google has been doing a great job innovating lately through the integration of their products (Docs and Spreadsheets, Calendar and Gmail, etc). This integration, however, has not come without security issues arising. TechCrunch has covered several of them – but I believe I have found another…

This may be hard to believe, but I can view unauthorized and unshared events on my calendar. Let me explain:

My friend Bryan has a Google Calendar with the following security/sharing settings:

Note that, as you would imagine, he only wants me to see free/busy information for his schedule.

And MY settings for HIS calendar are as follows:

The settings all look correct – I should be able to see only free/busy information about his events. But this is not the case – I can actually see all his event details.

I have had him unshare and reshare his calendar, with no better results. Luckily, Bryan and I are friends, so it is not a big deal that I can see his event details. But one can only imagine how this could be a big deal when your calendar has sensitive appointments.

I have to know – can anyone else reproduce this huge security bug?

Another problem I have with Google Calendar – and maybe I am not using it the way developers intended for me – but here’s what I do: I like to have different events in my life categorized in different calendars. Then, I can show/hide a certain set of events (personal, business, school, etc) quickly, and I can see by color coding how much time I am spending in each category.

The problem arises when I want to let someone else see my free/busy schedule on their own calendar. This means, not only do I have to share 5 calendars instead of 1, but that person then has to keep 5 calendars in their list. Why can’t there be a way to combine calendars into 1 for all my friends wanting to see free/busy status, or event event details? It is a big clutter for them to have 5 calendars just from mine to see when I’m free.

Lastly, I’m unhappy with the PDF that the Calendar generates to print both the month and week view. I am not against the idea of generating a PDF for printing complex designs – it is a good idea – but their implementation leaves much to be desired. The design and UI of the online version of the calendar is beautiful, however it seems as if the print layout was something thrown together a day before the product was to be released.

My biggest qualms are 1) it’s ugliness, 2) lack of details for events (it doesn’t even show the location of the event), and 3) lack of consideration for many events (when I have overlapping events sometimes it creates a box with no event name shown).

Google is doing a great job with many things, that is why when I notice issues like the above, it really stands out.

Update: Google responds.