If you’d like to have a globally-accessible installation of Tracks, which you could access from any computer on the internet, but you either don’t have a web server, web host, or don’t want the hassle of installing it yourself, you could try Morph eXchange. The Morph Application Platform allows you to run certain Ruby on Rails applications as services. They have some services which require a paid subscription, but their Tracks service is free to use. All you need to do is go to the homepage, signup for an account, then under subscriptions you will see Tracks listed. Click subscribe, and you can launch Tracks and enter your data.

If, like me, you have the snippet manager Yojimbo, you might be interested in a way to link actions to Yojimbo items. I often use this if I want to make extensive notes on an action, or if I want to update those notes frequently. It’s also handy if you want to keep login details close at hand for an action, but you don’t want to store passwords in plain text in Tracks.

It’s very easy. In Yojimbo, select the item you want to link, then go to Edit > Copy Item Link. Then switch to Tracks and click the edit button for the action you’re interested in. Paste the link you copied into the notes box, wrapped as a Textile link, like so (note that I’ve added spaces around the colon so that it renders properly on the page):

"Yojimbo item" : x-yojimbo-item://A8A40A39-blah-blah

When you update the action and open the notes field, you’ll find a clickable link that will open your Yojimbo item. It’s the kind of thing that’s crying out for an Applescript or a Quicksilver script to automate it, but it’s easy enough to do manually.

For those of you on Windows who have been struggling with getting Tracks installed, Jim Strupp has kindly packaged up an installation of Tracks which uses Uniform Server. Everything you need (except Ruby) is included, and it’s a simple double click on a batch file to start Tracks running. Give it a go! And many thanks to Jim for creating and hosting the package.

Updated 29-09-2006: Fixed the link to the installation.

mk sent me the following tip for people wanting to running Tracks on Windows using Mongrel as the webserver, rather than WEBrick, Apache or lighttpd:

Installing mongrel (this would work for Linux and MacOS X users too):

sudo gem install mongrel
cd tracks_directory
mongrel_rails start -d

Running the service:

mongrel_rails_service install -n tracks -r c:\path\to\tracks -p 4000 -e production
mongrel_rails_service start -n tracks

Now hit the port and poof, it works (or should). The application will stop if you use:

mongrel_rails_service stop -n tracks

Off course, you can control service at services in the control panel. I have it set to start on boot, and that’s it. Read more about Mongrel or more about Mongrel on Windows.

Jacken has a great and very simple tutorial for installing Tracks using Locomotive for those of you on MacOS X. It’s a great (nearly) one-click install. Thanks, Jacken!

Luke Melia came up with an absolute gem of a tip on the tracks-discuss mailing list. If you enter the following command in your crontab on the server which runs your copy of Tracks 1.04, it will email you a list of the upcoming actions which are due within the next 7 days every day at 6 am (the command should be on one line, without the backslashes):

0 6 * * * /usr/local/bin/curl -0 http://[tracks_url]/feed/text/[username]/[your_token]?due=6 | /usr/bin/mail -E -s 'Tracks actions due in the next 7 days' youremail@yourdomain.com

It’s easiest if you copy and paste the URL of the text feed from your feeds page. Of course you can choose any feed you like—why not email a list of next actions in a particular project to a group of colleagues who are working on the project?

Jeroen van der Ham has been hard at work improving the method for starting Tracks when you login on Mac OS X Tiger, and has produced a .plist file which works on its own, without the need for a separate shell script file.
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Several people have asked me if there’s a way to start up Tracks on your own machine when it boots or when you login. The answer if you’re using Mac OS X Tiger is yes—there’s an easy way.

NOTE: There’s now a better way to do this, which only involves one file.

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John Leonard has written up a fantastic tutorial for getting Tracks running on Windows XP, including using a package called Uniform Server which provides a web server and MySQL among other things. There’s also a full video tutorial with notes to make the whole process crystal clear.

Yay John! I love it when users help other users out.

Updated 25/10/2005 to link to John’s new and updated version of the tutorial that works with Tracks 1.03.

With revision 82, I’ve finally nearly finished the conversion of Tracks to use Ajax for creating, updating, deleting and marking actions done. I thought I’d put a couple of little movies up as a teaser.

The first shows me editing the list of projects [1 MB], and the second shows me adding and editing actions in a project [2 MB].

It’s still a bit rough around the edges; actions don’t sort properly, nor does the badge with the count of actions update until you refresh, and I haven’t quite sorted out the tab index on Safari. However, generally it’s coming along quite nicely

Rails 0.10.0 introduced a new—and very simple—method of re-writing URLs, which works with a variety of different servers, and means that the Rails app itself can be hold the re-writing rules, without having to mess about with .htaccess and the like.

However, it does require some changes to be made to Rails apps, and these aren’t present in Tracks 1.01. Needless to say, I’ve made the requisite changes to the next version which is in development (and they work really well!), but if you’ve got Rails 0.10.0 installed and want to use Tracks 1.01, you’ll have to make the following fix.

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qDot wrote up a really nice tutorial on how to install Ruby, Rails and Tracks on Dreamhost. It would probably also be a good guide for anyone else who is hosted on a server where Ruby isn’t already installed. However—and I feel a bit like a kids TV presenter saying that you should get an adult to help you with the cutting out—do ask your host first if they would mind you doing this. I don’t want to be responsible for anyone being booted off their server .

Note also that step 1 of installing Tracks isn’t necessary as of Tracks 1.01; Redcloth is distributed with the application.

Thanks, qDot!

[Posted to both here and on But She’s a Girl…]

Jason, of TextDrive fame, has been singing the praises of lighttpd recently. In my experience, when Jason sings about something techie, it’s worth listening.

A week or so ago, the Apache installation I use to test Tracks locally abruptly stopped working. I’m pretty sure that I just messed something up in my httpd.conf, but my motivation to go through it, find the problem and fix it was seriously lacking. So given all the great press that lighttpd has been getting, I thought I’d have a go at installing it on my machine last night.

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Updated to include corrections from commenters 19/02/2005

A couple of people have asked on the wiki how you set up Tracks so that you can access it from other computers. The answer depends a little on how you have your computer networked, and on the platform you are running on.

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It’s funny, but there’s nothing quite like actually using your own application day-in, day-out to give you ideas for improvements and new features. I installed Tracks on a server (at TextDrive), and I’ve been using it every day as my only ‘to do’ list. This experience has been surprisingly positive, but it has certainly highlighted the things which are missing or not done quite right. Other users have also been coming up with some great feature ideas and suggestions, so I thought I’d bring these together and discuss where I see Tracks going over the months ahead. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means…
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