GitHub provides a handy shortcut for creating a Pledgie campaign, and shows the button on the repository page. We were previously accepting donations using a Paypal button, which meant I then had to do some mental arithmetic and manually update the MacBook-O-Meter to show the additional donations. Pledgie is much easier to use, so I’ve now embedded the Pledgie button on the Contribute page, and also in the sidebar of the site. Click the button if you feel like making a donation! Pledgie donations can be anonymous or you can display your name proudly in the donors list, and you can use PayPal or a credit card for payment.

Spanish-speaking Tracks users will be interested to know that BitNami have a couple of screencasts in Spanish, showing the installation process with BitNami (which was produced by Javier Martínez) and an introduction to using Tracks. Many thanks to Antonio Santos at BitNami for pointing me to the screencasts, and for telling me that Tracks was the third most downloaded Stack on BitNami last month!

I’m happy to say that Tracks has now moved to GitHub. The subversion repository is still available as a read-only repository, but all new development will happen via Git at GitHub. The main reason for this move is to make it much easier for people to contribute to the project. Anyone can clone the repository and submit patches, but to make life even easier, you can sign up for a free account at GitHub and then fork Tracks. GitHub provides a ‘pull request’ button, so when you’ve added something cool or fixed a bug, hit the button and we’ll pull in your changes. Git makes merging much easier than Subversion, even if the codebase has moved on a bit since you created the patch.

The latest stable version of Tracks can still be downloaded as a .zip file (see the download link in the sidebar). If you don’t want to install Git, but you are feeling adventurous and want to get the very latest development version, you can use the ‘Download’ button on the GitHub page to get a tarball of the project.

To clone Tracks, change to a directory in which you want to store Tracks (e.g. ~/Sites):

git clone git://github.com/bsag/tracks.git
cd tracks

If (when!) you produce a cool new feature or fix a bug, create a patch. If you develop in a branch called ‘experiment’:

git diff master..experiment > my_feature.patch 

Then attach my_feature.patch to a ticket.

Or you can sign up for a free account on github and fork Tracks using the convenient button. You can then use the button to issue a pull request for your changes to be pulled into the main repository.

I’ve been getting a fair bit of spam slipping through Akismet’s fingers recently, so I’ve decided to turn comment moderation on and see how it goes. Please feel free to comment as usual, but remember that your comment won’t show up immediately. If you are a spammer, your comment won’t turn up at all!

I’ve just uploaded an introductory screencast to the screenshots page. In it, I introduce the basics of starting with a new, blank installation of Tracks, adjusting the preferences, adding contexts, projects and actions, and editing actions. In due course, I’ll add more screencasts on specific aspects, like using tags, the tickler, and the statistics page.

It’s the first screencast I’ve done with a voiceover, so please forgive the stumbling, mumbling parts. Watching the screencast, you might marvel at the fact that I lecture for a living. The thing is, I’m used to a live audience (except at 9am Monday lectures, where the audience is mostly asleep), and talking to myself felt distinctly odd I also seemed to be channelling Bill Lumbergh from Office Space, with my “let’s go ahead and…”. I don’t know why, because I almost never say that in real life. Anyway, enjoy, and try not to laugh too hard.

Manuel Morales from BitNami emailed to tell me about the Tracks Stack they have developed. These are easy to install, multi-platform packages for installing various Open Source applications. You download a package which installs as a stand-alone stack of all of the components required to run the application. What this means is that if you want to run Tracks on Windows XP, Linux or Mac OS X, but you don’t really know where to start with installing Ruby, Rails and MySQL, you can just download the stack. It installs everything you need and even configures the application and the database for you. The Tracks Stack installs the brand spanking new Tracks version 1.5rc1.

So if you’re interested by Tracks but have been daunted by the installation procedure, give a Tracks Stack a whirl!

After a lot of soul-searching, I’ve set up a PayPal donate button for those of you who would like to make a donation to support Tracks. We have a goal in mind: buying a MacBook for each of the developers, so that we can properly test Tracks on the Mac, Windows and Linux, using Parallels Desktop. See the Contribute page for the full details, and thanks in advance to anyone who is kind enough to make a donation!

I’ve been playing around with Locomotive recently, and I’m really impressed how easy the whole process is now. I’ve altered the zip package of Tracks 1.043 to make it as easy as possible for MacOS X users. I’ve pre-configured the package to use the SQLite3 database, which is included in the package, and also set up the logs and environment.rb file so that all you need to do is download Locomotive, point it at your Tracks folder and go! The full instructions are in the tracks-1.043 folder in installation.html.

As a side effect, the process of installation should be a little easier for Windows and Linux users too, because you no longer need to do the tedious copying of the *.tmpl files and folders. I’ve also included a security patch (details here). If you’re using Tracks on a public server, I would install the new version, but if it’s on your own machine with no public access, you should be fine.

I’m going to radically overhaul both the installation method and instructions for the next release, because I know that people get put off by the installation process.

Update 2007-03-25: A few users bumped into a problem with using newer versions of the Locomotive bundles (see explanation here), so I’ve updated the tracks-1.043.zip package to fix the problem, and updated the installation.html to explain the importance of using the ‘Standard Rails March 2007’ bundle.

You might have noticed the new box at the top of the sidebar on the right. Joyent—the company that produces the Joyent Connector online team management software, TextDrive webhosting, Strongspace secure backup space and Bingo! online storage—is participating in an affiliate programme. It works like this: if you click the links to the right and subsequently sign up for any of the services, I will get 15% of the sale, which will go towards supporting Tracks development.

I’m usually very wary of advertising of any form, but in this case, I’m happy to do it. After all, I eat my own dog food! All of my sites are hosted by TextDrive, and I’ve been more than happy with the service. I also have a Strongspace account, which is incredibly useful.

So if you’re looking for hosting, online storage or backup or team management software, do give them a look, and perhaps we can all benefit!

I’m not sure how many Tracks users also read my blog, so I thought I’d explain my unscheduled period of inactivity here too. I had to go into hospital for an operation, and am now on sick leave from work for 6 weeks. At the moment, I’m still feeling very sore and tired, so it might be a while before I catch up on emails, forum postings and tickets. As ever, thanks to all those who held the fort in my absence (and sorry I couldn’t let you know in advance—it was all a bit sudden), particularly Luke, who has carried on producing some great fixes while I’ve been away.

Like last year, I’m going to Brazil to work for most of September, and I leave tomorrow. I won’t have any email or web access while I’m there, so I obviously won’t be responding to support requests. Until I get back, you could try posting any requests for help on the forum or the mailing list.

Have fun, and see you when I get back!

I’ve started a couple of pages on the wiki for recommended web hosts for Tracks (i.e. web hosts that enable you to install Tracks yourself on a public server), and also hosted Tracks installations, where all you have to do is sign up for an account.

If you have any links to add to either page, please do. You need to sign in using the same credentials as you use for the Tracks Forum. If you don’t want to sign up for the forum, just send me the details that you want added and I’ll do it.

ExpressionEngine Personal also comes with a wiki module, which I’ve just set up. Previously, I was using a dokuwiki installation, which was difficult to maintain and had got rather outdated. Then I moved to the wiki included with Trac, which was much better, but because of the rather difficult way in which you have to manage users in Trac, it was a pain to set up users to allow them to edit the wiki, without leaving it open to all, which was just a spam magnet.

The new wiki is very nice and simple, and the great thing about it is that it shares user credentials with the forum. So if you’re already registered with the forum, you can log in to the wiki and edit pages there too.

I’ve just started porting some of the information over from the Trac wiki, but any help would be much appreciated as I’m chronically short of time at the moment. Eventually, I’ll reduce the information in the Trac wiki to the bare minimum for people wanting to check out the development trunk. It would be great if the new wiki could become a repository for the collected genius and experience of Tracks users, and could form a collaboratively written manual for it. The wiki uses Textile syntax, but you can also use plain ‘ole HTML markup. Have fun and get creative, and let’s see what we can come up with.

I had an unexpected and delightful email from Leslie Camacho, the VP of pMachine (who produce ExpressionEngine, which runs this site). He offered to donate personal licences for ExpressionEngine itself (which allows me access to some very useful modules not available in the Core version), and for the Discussion Forum module. It was a very generous offer that I was very happy to take up. As a result, we now have a new forum! You can view the forum topics and postings without being logged in, but if you want to post, you’ll have to register to get a user account (just use the register link at the top of the forum page).

I didn’t want to install a forum before because it seemed like a big hassle to have yet another kind of installation to manage. But the discussion module is wonderfully integrated into ExpressionEngine, and was easy to install once I sorted out a clash with my existing .htaccess rules (which wasn’t ExpressionEngine’s fault). Even better, user management is shared across the installation, so if you register, you can use the same login to comment on the project weblog, and if I install the wiki module, you can also use the same credentials there.

So have fun and chat away. I’m hoping that the forum will become a great resource for the community to share knowledge and ideas, which will supplement the existing mailing list.

Once again, a big thank you to Leslie at pMachine for the licences!

Assaf has said some very nice things about Tracks over at Labnotes:

If you’re looking for an Outlook-like experience, you’ll be disappointed. Tracks is not “___ for the Web”, it’s about organizing your next actions the GTD way. Yet, it doesn’t impose any strict set of rules, it guides you gently towards a better way to organize stuff.