Posted by Richard White
Mon, 21 May 2007 21:22:00 GMT
I’ve added a handy little checkbox that adds a lot of horsepower to reporting: You can now use your friend’s (coworkers/reporters) tags in your reports. This is the first step to dealing with the flood of requests I’ve had for shared tags between users to make task sharing easier.
I’m investigating taking this one step further and making tags shared throughout the rest of the application not just on reports: there would be one set of tags for a Task shared amongst all the people associated with it. I like the idea myself, but I’d like to hear from you before making a decision so please leave a comment with your thoughts.
Enjoy.
Posted by Richard White
Mon, 14 May 2007 22:24:00 GMT
What happened?
- Time entries created using the timer client would be marked as “in progress” (including not setting and end time) until the entry was completed.
- Reports were tuned to not count “in progress” entries since I didn’t want people invoicing based on partial entries.
- Due to things like browsers crashing and computers going into standby entries were being left as “in progress” and thus weren’t showing up in reports.
What’s been done to address this?
- Reporting now includes these “in progress” entries by default, but you can toggle this to compare to previously run reports.
- You can see a list of your affected “in progress” entries here to help you decide if you need to re-run past reports (eg: for invoicing purposes) otherwise no action is required of you.
What else will be done?
- After giving sufficient time for everyone to review their entries, I’ll set all “in progress” entries as completed and remove the “in progress” toggle from reporting.
- The client timer and the API are being changed so that no new entries can get stuck in this permanent ‘in-progress’ limbo. Though it’s a moot point since reporting now includes ‘in-progress’ entries.
Bottom Line: No data has been lost, but some was not showing up in reporting. Check your list of affected entries and decide whether you need to re-run past reports for invoicing purposes otherwise you’re fine.
I thank you for your understanding and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. If you have any concerns about your data feel free to email me directly.
Posted by Richard White
Thu, 10 May 2007 21:07:00 GMT
A great weight has been lifted in my life with the release of 1.0 of ActiveScaffold.
15 months ago :: It was just me and AjaxScaffold
8 months ago :: Scott and I started on what would become ActiveScaffold with our plugin version
Today :: The 5 member ActiveScaffold team releases 1.0
Phew!
Posted by Richard White
Tue, 27 Mar 2007 05:12:00 GMT
When Lindsay asked me how long I expected to stay at this weekend’s SuperHappyDevHouse gathering, I looked at the stated end time of 1 am and said ‘pssh there’s no way I’ll be there until 1 am’. I was right; I didn’t end up leaving until 1:30 am and that’s only because we were getting kicked out.
SHDH was probably the best techie meetup event I’ve been to since I moved to the Bay Area. The fact that the house is packed with smart, interesting people and you have all day to find out more about them leads to deeper conversations than you find at your average gathering. In addition to chitty chat, introduced some fellow freelancers to SlimTimer, demo’d ActiveScaffold and most importantly increased my network of designer/frontend friends by about 3x which was my primary reason for heading out there in the first place.
I was impressed by the fortitude of the people there actually getting work done, I guess I’ve just been caged up in my tiny apartment for too much for the allure of geekspeak was too strong for me to get in any hackery of my own.
I’m on the left wearing a reddit t-shirt and my mobile wrist rest (aka sweat band).
Pictures of the event on flickr
Posted by Richard White
Mon, 19 Mar 2007 10:54:00 GMT
Congratulations to the Justin.tv crew of Justin, Emmett, Kyle and Michael for a successful late night launch and coinciding TechCrunch coverage. I had the pleasure of working the Justin and Emmett on Kiko and I’ve got nothing but positive memories of that experience and am lucky to still consider those guys good friends. Now I’ll be honest, when they told me about their next big thing I was a bit shocked, I mean, doing a 24/7 online reality tv show is as much of a 180 as you can do from the pragmatic world of Web 2.0 calendaring. But they were really passionate about the idea and, in this day and age, that counts for a lot. I didn’t end up signing on for the Justin.tv experience because of my existing commitment to SlimTimer and the fact that the success of Justin.tv is predicated on marketing, having quality content, and video streaming servers moreso than web design (unlike Kiko).
Coincidentally we all separately migrated to San Francisco and the guys now live less than 10 blocks away so I get to see a good deal of the J.tv team. Note that all four guys share a two bedroom apartment and have 1-4 extra visitors at any given time. It’s been exciting to be part of their private beta and watch the project and its members mature. I’ve watched Justin become more adept at design and CSS, marveled at Kyle’s improvements to the camera setup and video quality, seen Emmett put together their own content delivery network using EC2 when existing providers proved to be too expensive or too unreliable, and salivated as Mike worked his kitchen magic putting on a delicious gourmet meal for all the local startups every Thursday (Oh and all the biz dev stuff he’s done like securing cool sponsors and such)
It has also been an interesting way to get up with my friends without making a phone call: “Oh I can see that Justin still isn’t even dressed to go out, I can wait another 15 mins before heading over there” or “Where the heck are they heading now… ahh Union St. I’ll head them off at the pass”.
Now that they’re finally live there are a couple of subplots I’ll be following:
- Can they survive the “First Day TechCrunch Effect” and keep their videos feeds up? I’m pretty sure they didn’t plan for the TC article to come out at 1 AM PST so it’ll be a long, Bawls-powered night for those guys.
- Can they maintain a high level of interesting content or will the whole Truman Show like appeal drive uptake regardless of content quality?
- Could Justin.tv be the fourth horseman of the Web 2.0 Apocalypse as some have predicted? (Was Kiko the first?)
- What are the chances of Justin finding romance with a camera strapped to his head?
- And the big question is… how can I use the video feed to gain the upper hand on Justin for Poker night?
Good luck guys, I’ll be watching.
Posted by Richard White
Fri, 09 Mar 2007 20:54:00 GMT
AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favor of ActiveScaffold
I’m relieved to announce that ActiveScaffold 1.0 RC1 has been released. ActiveScaffold is a Ruby on Rails plugin and the successor to the successful AjaxScaffold project that I’ve written a lot about here. This means that the end is nigh for AjaxScaffold: I’ll continue to keep the AjaxScaffold site up but no further development will take place. Once ActiveScaffold 1.0 is released I’ll put of the official EOL (end of life) statement on ajaxscaffold.com and suggest that everyone start using ActiveScaffold instead.
It also means the end of h1p acting as the project changeblog which I couldn’t be happier about :)
Posted by Richard White
Mon, 05 Mar 2007 07:56:00 GMT
While it took a bit longer than expected, everything has been fully moved over to the new server and is online. My apologies to everyone who had to track their time by pen and paper this evening; your sacrifice will be rewarded with a more responsive SlimTimer.
Posted by Richard White
Thu, 01 Mar 2007 06:10:00 GMT
As some of you may have noticed, SlimTimer has been a tad less responsive than usual the last couple days topping out last Friday by being downright comatose for a couple hours. After much sleuthing around the server logs I’ve determined that SlimTimer was part a victim of it’s own success (with traffic up significantly since the new year) but moreso fell victim to inefficiencies at the database level: unoptimized queries and unhelpful database settings.
I’ve already moved to correct those database settings which should fix the bulk of the problems. I’m also bringing in some people to optimize those queries and this Sunday (3/4) SlimTimer will be down for a good chunk of the afternoon (PST) while it’s moved to a bigger server.
A number of your have expressed concern about the long-term viability of SlimTimer and even offered donations. I appreciate the sentiment, but your current donations of patience have been more than enough. We’ve got big things planned for SlimTimer, which I’ll hopefully get to announce soon, and it’s not going anywhere but up. It will be a smoother ride from here on out.
Posted by Richard White
Tue, 13 Feb 2007 04:01:00 GMT
Before we get to the part where I spill the beans on the big plans I have for SlimTimer, I need something from you first.
If you login to SlimTimer, and you’re a regular user*, you’ll be prompted to fill out a survey that asks for information about how you use SlimTimer, who you are and what other online tools you use. It would be great if everyone could fill this survey out as it will have a direct bearing on where the site goes from here. The survey is only for regular users of SlimTimer so if you don’t see the popup or the link just keep using SlimTimer and you’ll get your chance to be heard.
Privacy Disclosure: Your individual survey information will be kept private but I may do a blog post on the aggregate data (ex: X% of SlimTimer users use BaseCamp).
* A regular user is defined as someone who’s logged more than 5 hours in the last 10 days but created their account over 10 days ago
Posted by Richard White
Sun, 11 Feb 2007 19:53:00 GMT
After a bit of a hiatus, I’ve released a number of long awaited improvements:
- Popup calendar for Edit Entries
- Users filter for reports
- Snapshot of total time logged per day on Edit Entries
- Autocomplete for tags on the SlimTimer client (bonus: all autocompleters are now much much faster and more responsive)
... and stay tuned for information on some some big news about some upcoming major additions to SlimTimer.
It’s good to be back.
