AJAX Fun

Happy new year. Hope you all had a nice holiday and were able to take some time off work. I took off all of Christmas week and don't have to go into work until Wednesday because the markets, and therefore my current client UBS Investment Bank, are closed to honor Gerald Ford on Tuesday. I'll be nice and rested after 11 days of no work!
I've wanted to get my hands dirty and learn AJAX for a while now but didn't really have a reason until last week. To make a long story short and faciliate my AJAX discussion...I volunteered to help the Hoboken Synagogue with their website a few months ago and met up with some of the other website volunteers last week. Myself and another volunteer suggested using a Google Calendar to maintain all of the synagogue's events. This way synagogue members could add the calendar feed to their Google Calendar (or other calendar applications) and the website could display the calendar's events. This seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to learn AJAX and another set of Google APIs. I found an AJAX calendar reader online which I customized for the Hoboken synagogue site. Right now the data isn't formatted very nicely but here's the link for the USH Calendar Feed Test Page.
I'm amazed at how simple Google has made it to query a Google Calendar. Using simple JavaScript functions it's pretty easy to dynamically create HTML and display event information. Maybe I'll even figure out a nice use for AJAX on The People's Ticket!