ZenLinux Blog

It has been a long, long time since any blog updates, but I have comitted a handful of bugfixes to Thought2Action over the past couple of months. Just minor stuff like resetting the date picker to today’s date after entering a new task, etc.

In other news, I finally picked up David Allen’s book Getting Things Done. The GTD phenomenon has become very fad-like in tech culture, but as I’m reading the book I’m seeing it has some really good things to offer. The Franklin system is very top-down in it’s approach, and GTD is bottom-up. I hope to finish the book in the next week or two and consider how it may impact T2A.

With LinuxWorld Boston over, I’m catching up with all the things that piled up over the week. For some sanity I decided to do a bit more thought2action work, too. I’ve tweaked some cosmetic things that I found annoying, and added a really useful feature. The todo control link “Update Overdue Tasks” takes any incomplete todos that are overdue and makes them due today. Since I’m so ambitious and set out to do much more than I can accomplish on most given days, I have wanted this ability since I started using the app on a daily basis.

Bug fixed. It’s been a busy past couple of weeks.

Sorry folks, I’ve had to disable the demo site for the time being. A new security vulnerability was found in PHPiCalendar and I haven’t seen a fix yet from the developers. It won’t be long, I’m sure.

Only a minor tweak added this week. Note the new “Re-sort Tasks” control link. That allows you to force a refresh of the task list, which is useful after re-prioritizing or changing the due date of tasks.

I’ve been focusing this weekend more on documenting ideas I’ve had for a web-based activism portal, of which Thought2Action could become an important component of.

Up until now there has been a really annoying bug with the date pickers. Basically, any AJAX call that regenerates the todo item will break the date picker so that the calendar doesn’t pop-up. For some reason javascript within script tags in the replacement HTML is not run after an innerHTML is done. I presume it’s for security reasons. Anyway, I have a reasonable workaround and it resolves this problem.

New development, new demo site update. The display of tasks now has a sense of date context. That means if the calendar is displaying today you’ll see today’s tasks, and if you switch to another date you’ll see tasks for that day.

I plan to make this a configurable option, but for now the following heuristics are used to display tasks:

• All tasks due on the selected date, regardless of status
• Overdue tasks (i.e, due date is before the selected day and the task status is INCOMPLETE)
• Tasks that have been modified within the last 8 hours (so you will still see new tasks you just added or modified), relative to the current time.

My personal daily-use install of T2A has about a thousand tasks in it, and there are no significant performance issues.

The next step is probably to create some sort of searchable interface for tasks, becuase if you don’t know what their due date was, you can loose track of them if you haven’t just recently added or edited them. I’d like to work on some more documentation too, though.

I’ve just upgraded this blog to WordPress v2. Sometimes this process can confuse RSS feed readers. I’ve noticed the blog can be very slow to save posts to, even though I know my server is not under load or lacking in bandwidth, so I hope this helps.