blog.wakerupper.com a weblog about Wakerupper

Google Calendar Hack

This is the first in a series of posts that will demonstrate various methods of integrating Wakerupper with other online tools that you already use.

Many people who use Wakerupper also use some form of calendaring software to manage their schedules. In a typical case, a person might first identify an important event in their calendar and then, in a second step, visit Wakerupper.com to schedule a corresponding telephone reminder. This process is inconvenient and inefficient. But what if you could assign telephone reminders to events without leaving your calendar?

Objective

Schedule Wakerupper telephone reminders from within Google Calendar.

Requirements

1. Wakerupper account
2. Gmail account (for this hack to work, your Wakerupper email must be your gmail account)
3. Google Calendar (if you have Gmail, you have this)

First in your Gmail…

1. Go to Gmail > Settings > Filters
2. Create a new filter
3. In the field ‘Has the words:’, type ‘wkr’
4. Click the ‘Next step’ button
5. Select ‘Forward it to:’ and put ‘gcal@wakerupper.com’ in the text box.
6. Click the ‘Create Filter’ button

Then, in your Google Calendar…

1. Go to Google Calendar > Settings > Calendars > Notifications
2. Set ‘By default, remind me via Email 5 minutes before each event.”
3. Create an event in Google Calendar, and include ‘wkr’ in the ‘what’ or ‘description’ field of your event.

Okay, all set?

Five minutes before your event, Google Calendar will send a notification email to your Gmail, which will recognize the ‘wkr’ and forward the notification to Wakerupper, which looks up your default phone number using your email address, calls you on the phone, and reads you the text in the ‘what’ of your Google Calendar event.

Now anytime you want a Wakerupper telephone reminder for your Google Calendar event, just include the text ‘wkr’ in your Google Calendar event.

Note: The Wakerupper-Google Calendar hack is experimental software and while it is known to work, it should be considered less stable than other methods of scheduling Wakerupper telephone reminders.

Sorry to the folks who left comments on our previous blog. We just moved to Wordpress from our previous blogging software, and we haven’t had time to migrate the comments.

[...] the bright side, the Google Calendar Hack is still going strong, and integration with more 3rd-party services is on the way. These icons [...]

Does this hack work for Google Apps people? My email address isn’t at gmail.com, but I still use gmail and google calendar.

The GCal hack does not require that inbound email come from a …@gmail.com address, so it should work with Google Apps with no problem. Please let us know how it goes.

Would be sweet if this works on Google Apps because i have dozens of domains on there I could use this with…

The GCal hack does indeed work with Google Apps. One thing to remember is that you need to make sure the email associated with your Wakerupper account is your Google Apps email.