Our modification to the tracks code to add the ability to add todos with attachments via emails is coming along. I have been using it personally for a few weeks. I would like to find a few folks who could help me test it by signing up for an account on my server and using it.
Either reply to this post, or send me a PM if you are interested in helping. As soon as we get this stable, we are going to post the code back to tracks. Its really made the app even more useful for me, and I hope that a few folks out there can help me work the rest of the kinks out.
Thanks
Matt
Here is a simple script that allows you to email your Tasks to your tracks install, creating new entries and contexts and due dates at the same time (and yes, my code really IS shorter than my comments):
#!/usr/bin/perl
# _._
# /_ _`. (c) 2008, David A. Desrosiers
# (.(.)| setuid@gmail.com
# |\_/'|
# )____`\ Email-to-Tracks interface
# //_V _\ \
# (( | `(_) If you find this useful, please drop me
# / \> ' / \ an email, or send me bug reports if you find
# \ \.__./ / problems with it. I accept PayPal too! =-)
# `-' `-'
#
##############################################################################
#
# License
#
##############################################################################
#
# This script is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
# under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
# Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option)
# any later version.
#
# The copyright notice must remain intact to remain in compliance with use.
#
# This script is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
# ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
# FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for
# more details.
#
##############################################################################
#
# You'll need to set this up as an alias in your MTA configuration (typically
# /etc/aliases), as follows:
#
# tracks@your-site.tld: "|/path/to/gtd-tracks-mail.pl"
#
# Don't forget to run newaliases(1) after you've modified this so it can
# update the aliases table with the new entry.
#
# Email format can be any of the following:
#
# Subject: The main description of the Task
#
# @Context
# 01/02/2003
# This is my note text
#
# or:
#
# Subject: Default Task description
#
# c: @context
# d: 2008/12/31
# n: The note text to insert
#
# Most valid date formats are accepted, and this will do its best to
# "correct" and normalize them. You can also prefix your lines with the
# modifiers above, or read the regexes below for more. For example:
# c:, context:, cxt:, con:, ct: are all valid prefixes for "context"
# n: and note: are all valid prefixes for "notes", and so on.
#
##############################################################################
use strict;
use warnings;
use XML::Simple;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use URI::Escape;
use Email::Abstract;
use Date::Manip;
use Date::Parse;
my $url = "http://your-site.tld/todos.xml";
my $contextUrl = "http://your-site.tld/contexts.xml";
# The default contextid where you want the Task added
# SELECT id,name FROM contexts;
my $contextid = "8";
my $user = "yourname";
my $password = "yourpass";
# Leave these tokens alone. They are valid as of Tracks 1.5 RESTful API.
my %todo = map { +($_ => "todo[$_]") } qw(notes context_id description due);
# Get the context legend in order to match by name
my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
my $req = new HTTP::Request 'GET',$contextUrl;
$req->authorization_basic($user,$password);
my $res = $ua->request($req);
my $contexts = XMLin($res->content);
# Split apart the email into Subject and Body
my $message = do { local $/; <STDIN> };
my $email = Email::Abstract->new($message);
my $subject = $email->get_header("Subject");
my $body = $email->get_body;
# These can probably be cleaned up a bit
my ($context_line) = $body =~ /^(?:c:|ct:|cxt:|con:|context:|@)\s*(.+)$/mi;
my ($date_line) = $body =~ /^(?:d:|date:)\s*(\d.*)$/m;
$date_line = UnixDate(ParseDate("today"), "%g") if (length($date_line) == 0);
my $time = str2time($date_line);
my $due_date = UnixDate(scalar gmtime($time), "%m/%d/%Y");
my ($note_line) = $body =~ /^(?:n:|note:)\s*(.*?)$/mi;
# Concatenate the data here before we send POST to the Tracks server
my $post_data =
$todo{'context_id'} . "=" . $contextid . "&" .
$todo{'description'}. "=" . uri_escape($subject) . "&" .
$todo{'notes'} . "=" . uri_escape($note_line) . "&" .
$todo{'due'} . "=" . uri_escape($due_date);
# Use LWP to do the posting ($ua was created earlier)
$req = new HTTP::Request 'POST',$url;
$req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
$req->content($post_data);
$req->authorization_basic($user,$password);
$res = $ua->request($req);
I have rigged my hosted Tracks installation to be able to receive emails into an Inbox context I can sort through later.
This allows me to go through my email (gmail, or otherwise) and forward emails to “mygtd@mydomain.com” and have it automatically create a to-do with the subject of the email as the description and the body of the email as a note.
Again, this is somewhat tricky, but if you have the background to do it, I am including source code. In this case, all we have used is a perl script.
I can provide very little support, so hopefully you can get it working. This is something I badly wanted, and found a way to do… I didn’t think I should hoarde the benefits to myself, but neither can I be as much assistance as I would like.
Requirements:
I. You have to run your own email server capable of receiving emails and piping it to a script. If you don’t know what this means, you may not be able to do it.
II. You probably have to be running Tracks in a hosted environment. I have not tried it with anything other than on a linux host.
Once you have created the email address, modify the following script per the comments, and pipe it to the script. It works wonderfully.
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Quick and dirty hack to add tasks via an email.
# Install by adding an alias in /etc/aliases or /etc/valiases depending
# on yor system:
#
# mygtdaddress@mydomain.com: "|/home/directory/inboxgtd.pl"
#
use strict;
use WWW::Curl::Easy;
open (STDOUT, ">/dev/null"); # Redirect CURL output to null. Some mail servers will bounce
open (STDERR, ">/dev/null"); # messages if there is any return.
# Replace with todos.xml url of your GTD installation
# my $url = "http://yourgtd.yourdomain.com/todos.xml";
my $url = "http://yourgtd.yourdomain.com/todos.xml";
# The contextid where you want the todo added. Usually an inbox.
my $contextid = "1";
my $curl = WWW::Curl::Easy->new();
my $description = "";
my $note = "";
# Your authorization credentials in the format
# my $auth = "username:password";
#
my $auth = "username:password";
# Leave these tokens alone. They are valid as of Tracks 1.5 RESTful API.
my $notetag = "todo[notes]";
my $contexttag = "todo[context_id]";
my $descriptiontag = "todo[description]";
# Dirty hack. First blank line begins body text.
my $passedempty = 0;
my @mail = <STDIN>; # Read in the piped email
my $line = "";
foreach $line (@mail)
{
if ( ($line =~ m/Subject: (.*)/) ) # If it's the subject line...
{
$description = $1; # ... use it for the todo description
}
if ( $line =~ m/^$/ ) # Checking for that blank line
{
$passedempty = 1;
}
if ($passedempty) # Once we see it ...
{
$note = $note . $line; # Copy every blank line into the todo note.
}
}
# Here we munge the data together to post.
my $post_data = $contexttag . "=" . $contextid . "&" . $descriptiontag . "=" . $description . "&" . $notetag . "=" . $note;
# We execute curl to do the posting.
$curl->setopt(CURLOPT_URL, $url);
$curl->setopt(CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_data);
$curl->setopt(CURLOPT_USERPWD, $auth);
$curl->perform();
close STDOUT;
close STDERR;
Here it is my suggestion of improvement:
I find very useful the option “Show from“ for an action, in order to defer an action to an specific date. But, could be possible to specify in “Show from“ form something like “defer up to another action completion“ ?
My reasoning: Sometimes an action precedes some other. So the second action should not be shown visible up to the previous one has been toggled as completed, and not at an predefined date.
I think this could be helpful if added, and in this way actions could be chained. In this way actions deferred after others won’t be shown before the action established as a prerequisite has been completed.
Masters, I will be waiting your feedback.
Thanks for so wonderful GTD application.
i started out with the Mac/Locomotive method at first, but then wanted to access it from anywhere—so i put it up on http://tracks.tra.in and told all my non-techie friends about it. it’s open/free for all, especially those who wouldn’t otherwise install it themselves.
based on their feedback, i’ve been tweaking small interface elements just a bit (like using the context/project name instead of “[C]“ or “[P]“ in item view) and hacked it to allow open signups. i’m also working on an (optional) “gmail-esque” layout. though Tracks is already so elegant and simple—i don’t want to spoil it.
but i hope this is all OK with you—i’ll send patches of the tweaks, though they’re currently pretty small.
]]>I am trying to convert my todo system from todoist.com to a tracks installation. Due to problems with 1.6 (smooth ajax contexts not expanding enough to contain all actions; context sorting not being persistent; context expands/folds on home page not being consistent) I’ve installed a git tarball from yesterday (2008-11-07) behind apache2+fastcgi on Ubuntu 7.10.
When making a next action, I would often like to add urls to the relevant gmail mails in the notes field. With simple URLs without “&“ characters this works fine: “URL”:http://my.url.com/
However, if the URL has &s;in (which it often has), these are all changed to “&“. When I open the edit box, they’re fine, but as soon as I save the next action and mouse over the URL, it’s useless.
What am I doing wrong? Any other advice on how to get around this?
Thanks for a great piece of software,
Charl Botha
http://cpbotha.net/
This error did annoy me very much, thus I tried to find a temporary workaround ‘till the issue is solved.
in model user.rb add
def find_by_params(params)
find(params['id'] || params['context_id']) || nil
end
# Start insertion HBo 2008-11-29
def update (id,params)
context = self.detect { |c| c.id == id.to_i }
context.update_attribute(:position, params[:position]) unless context.nil?
end
# End insertion HBo 2008-11-29
end
params[“list-contexts”] in controller context order method contains an empty entry thats the reason for context.nil? Please be aware that this mostly will work around the effect and not really solves the cause.
Works for me and hope it will work for you but of cause there may be side effects I’m not aware of
*** NO WARRENTY USE AT OWN RISC ***
]]>I was running Tracks 1.5 happily when I made the stupid mistake of updating my Debian installation to its latest release. Then I got Ruby 1.8.7 (package ruby1.8, version 1.8.7.22-3) and I could not log in anymore due to errors. So I decided to update my Tracks to 1.6 and now I can loging, but then I got the messages on the web page that I include below (but no logs). Curiously for me, a longer version gets copied using Windows copy/paste, which I have attached.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Rafael
NoMethodError in Todos#index
Showing todos/_toggle_notes.rhtml where line #3 raised:
undefined method `[]' for #<Enumerable::Enumerator:0xb6fabe94>
Extracted source (around line #3):
1: <%= link_to(image_tag( 'blank.png', :width=>'16', :height=>'16', :border=>'0' ), "#", {:class => 'show_notes', :title => 'Show notes'}) %>
2: <% apply_behavior 'a.show_notes:click', :prevent_default => true do |page, element|
3: element.next('.todo_notes').toggle
4: end
5: -%>
6: <div class="todo_notes" id="<%= dom_id(item, 'notes') %>" style="display:none">
Trace of template inclusion: /todos/_todo.html.erb, /contexts/_context.rhtml, /todos/index.html.erb
RAILS_ROOT: /opt/tracks-1.6
Application Trace | Framework Trace | Full Trace
vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/string/access.rb:43:in `first'
vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/inflector.rb:151:in `camelize'
vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb:49:in `camelize'
vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_view/helpers/prototype_helper.rb:1079:in `method_missing'
vendor/plugins/unobtrusive_javascript/lib/ujs/javascript_proxies.rb:43:in `__send__'
vendor/plugins/unobtrusive_javascript/lib/ujs/javascript_proxies.rb:43:in `method_missing'
app/views/todos/_toggle_notes.rhtml:3:in `_run_erb_47app47views47todos47_toggle_notes46rhtml'
app/views/todos/_toggle_notes.rhtml:2:in `_run_erb_47app47views47todos47_toggle_notes46rhtml'
app/views/todos/_todo.html.erb:19:in `_run_erb_47app47views47todos47_todo46html46erb'
app/views/contexts/_context.rhtml:34:in `_run_erb_47app47views47contexts47_context46rhtml'
app/views/todos/index.html.erb:4:in `_run_erb_47app47views47todos47index46html46erb'
app/controllers/todos_controller.rb:568:in `render_todos_html'
app/controllers/todos_controller.rb:18:in `index'
Request
Parameters:
None
Show session dump
---
:js_behaviours:
:rules: []
:options:
:reapply_after_ajax: true
:cache:
return-to:
user_id: 2
flash: !map:ActionController::Flash::FlashHash
:notice: "Login successful: session will not expire."
noexpiry: "on"
Response
Headers:
{"Content-Type"=>"text/html",
"cookie"=>[],
"Cache-Control"=>"no-cache"}
What I suggest is that we try to agree on a localisation solution, and then once that is settled, anyone who is skilled in other languages (but not necessarily in Ruby programming) could contribute the necessary text). Perhaps someone with some Rails experience could take a lead and fork Tracks on github, then set up the necessary structure for localisation. Then others can chip in with the actual translations.
I know absolutely nothing about localisation, so if anyone has any experience with different localisation solutions, let us know if you have a favoured library or plugin.
]]>