Tracks

New domain for Tracks

2008-12-30T15:50:10+00:00

...and a new home! I have now completed the migration to the new Shared Accelerator at Joyent.com, and in the process, gave Tracks its own domain name: getontracks.org. You may find that the new server feels a bit more snappy than the old one, and it should be more stable and reliable. The migration process was fairly complex, and it’s possible that some links may be broken, so do please email me if you find anything amiss. I’ve redirected the old domain to the new one, so feed readers should pick up the redirection. If they do not, you might want to enter the new feed URLmanually for the RSS2 feed or Atom feed.

I was hoping to replace our Trac bug tracker with a custom solution run with ExpressionEngine (which runs this site), but importing existing tickets proved too much for my pre-Christmas brain! Instead, I imported all the old tickets into an Assembla space. Assembla offers a number of rather cool features, and will be easier for me to administer. You can find out how to use the site to submit tickets here.

Important news about the site

2008-12-21T14:56:34+00:00

I’ve got a couple of announcements to make:

1. I’m going to move from comment moderation on the Tracks site, to requiring membership to make comments. I’m hoping that this will be more effective in reducing spam, and will require less intervention from me as a moderator. To facilitate this, I’ve added a login form to the top of every page. The membership is the same as for the forum and wiki, so if you have already signed up for either of those, just sign in with your username and password. If you have uploaded an avatar, it should also show that avatar against your name if you make a comment. I’m also creating a bug tracker within the Tracks website, so you will also be able to use the same credentials to create tickets and comment on tickets that others have created.
2. I’ve got to move the entire Tracks site (and my own blog) to a new server over Christmas. In the process, I’ll have to disable the current site, Trac, forum and mailing list for a short while so that I don’t lose any data in the move. I’ll try to make that period as short as possible, but it depends on the process going smoothly! So if you see a notice that the site is down over the next few days, don’t be surprised. When it is finished, we should get faster page loading and experience much greater stability.
3. When this process is all over, Tracks will get its own, shiny new domain at long last: http://www.getontracks.org/ I’ll redirect the old site to the new one, but it would be a good idea to update your bookmarks when the process is finished too.

Wish me luck! It’s a bit of a complex process, and I’m fairly scared of messing things up!

Tracks 1.7rc

2008-12-14T12:48:16+00:00

Tracks 1.7rc has been released:

I’m pleased to announce that Tracks 1.7RC has been released. This is a pre-release of version 1.7. Please help out to test this pre-release to find any bugs before we release 1.7 in a few weeks

What’s new:

* The included Rails version is updated to 2.2.2
* Tracks now supports recurring/repeating todos
* Cleanup of feed page and add feed for starred actions
* Initial importer of yaml files (still very EXPERIMENTAL; please send
feedback on whether to include this; make backups while testing it)
* New interface to import an email / sms messages into Tracks (needs an
email server on the same server as Tracks)
* New buttons to quickly defer an action 1 or 7 days
* Calendar view to review upcoming due actions, includes iCal feed to
use in your calendar app (tested with Google Calendar, Evolution, Outlook
2007)
* You can now sort projects on number of active todos
* Support for OpenSearch. This means you can add a Tracks as a search
provider in your webbrowser (tested on FF3 and IE7)
* Bugfixes, including fixing OpenID

There are changes to the database, and a few changes to config/environment.rb.tmpl, so please migrate your database and copy the template file and merge your personalisations with it. More upgrade instructions are in the manual in the /doc directory.

This release of 1.7 will include enhancements made by a lot new contributers (Jakub, Hans, Piotr, MHarris and Simon). Thank you all for helping Tracks getting better every release. As ever particular thanks to Luke (for updating Tracks to 2.2.2) and to Reinier for masses of work on a lot of fronts, not least in making it extremely easy for me to announce and distribute this release!

IRC channel

2008-08-18T20:12:14+00:00

IRC is a commonly used medium for realtime inter-developer/developer-user and user communication.

I saw that #tracks on freenode was still available so I registered it. Feel free to join.

Development news: Tracks moves to GitHub

2008-06-15T10:53:57+00:00

Get the full story here:

http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/news/comments/tracks-moves-to-github/

NEW! Tracks 1.5 final

2008-03-31T21:08:55+00:00

The final version of Tracks 1.5 is released:

http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/downloads/comments/tracks-15/

I’ve also updated the home page, the manual and screenshots for the new release.

Have fun!

Tracks 1.6

2008-06-03T21:02:51+00:00

I’m pleased to announce that Tracks 1.6 has been released.

What’s new:
* The included Rails version is updated to 2.0.2
* You can now search the contents of todos, projects and notes (thanks, Jeffrey Gipson!)
* Improvements to the mobile view, including a few iPhone specific improvements for those of you lucky enough to have an iPhone
* A few bug fixes

An important caveat is that OpenID support is broken in 1.6. The fix is a bit complicated because of changes to the ruby-openid gem, so we wanted to get 1.6 out before fixing it. If you depend on OpenID support, we’d advise waiting until the next release. There are no changes to the database, but quite a few changes to config/environment.rb.tmpl, so please copy the template file and merge your personalisations with it.

Many thanks to Luke, Reinier and Jeffrey for their hard work on this release!

NEW! Tracks 1.5RC1

2008-03-06T19:15:13+00:00

Tracks 1.5 Release Candidate 1 is… released!

Tracks 1.5RC1

I’ve posted a few screenshots on the wiki

Huge thanks to all the other Tracks contributors who have had far more input to this release than I have, to great effect—this is a terrific release.

Away until 17th September 2007

2007-08-25T16:19:45+00:00

I’m going to be travelling to Brazil for work from tomorrow (26th August) until 17th September. I’m going to be decidedly out of touch (even phoning someone from our location is almost impossible), so I’m afraid I won’t be around to answer questions. Hopefully experienced users will pitch in to help people with questions out while I’m gone.

See you in 3 weeks!

Registration working again

2007-07-01T15:19:40+00:00

Apparently, registration had stopped working (thanks to Angus for pointing it out!). There was a new version of ExpressionEngine out, and a new Discussion Forum module version, so I tried upgrading in the hope that this might fix things. It didn’t, and in the process, I managed to mess things up even more badly so that it you got a message about the forum being offline if you tried to view it when logged out. Since you then couldn’t get to the link to log in or register, this was something of a Catch 22 situation!

I think I’ve ironed things out now: you can view the forum as a guest (i.e. when not logged in) as intended, and the Register link takes you to the registration page. The styling of the registration pages are different, but at least it works!

Sorry for the inconvenience.