ZenLinux Blog

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.

It’s official; as of this evening I am now using an install of Thought2Action as my primary task manager. Expect a flurry of changes over the next week or two as I fix annoyances.

I made a number of database changes earlier today and updated the demo site; what you’ll find in particular is that only incomplete and tasks with a modification date within the past three days are displayed. As I imported my 13k line tasks.ics file into the database, I realized I’ll need to modify that to also hide tasks not yet due, and using coloring for overdue tasks wouldn’t hurt either.

All in time. I find it hard to believe I’m finally at this point with the app, after nearly six months of background, spare-time development. Very exciting.

Unfortunately I haven’t been doing any cross-browser testing during recent development. As a result, I’m kind of shocked at the way the site looks on non-Firefox browsers. Under IE, the entire table gets outlined in the goal/value/quote editors, not just the outer frame as in Firefox and Safari. In Safari, it appears impossible to use the date picker calendar. For the time being, just use Firefox.

I do want this project to be reasonably cross-browser compatible, so I will take steps to improve this over time.