M@'s Musings

In the process, it's moved URLs as well. You can now find it at:

http://taskthis.elucidata-apps.com

The old URL (taskthis.darthapo.com) should redirect you there automatically.

I had to convert TaskTHIS from Rails 1.1 to Rails 2.1, which was not too fun. Especially since it had already been converted from pre-1.0 to 1.1.

Anyway, it's probably still a little rough around the edges, so if you find any bugs please add a post in the support forum.

I'm in the process of shuffling servers around, so a lot of the apps/sites I've created will be down whilst I make the move.

Some things are already back up: ZooDotCom and Lil Monstas. Others, like Maelstrom and TaskTHIS are not.

In fact, TaskTHIS may take a little while longer to bring back up. I'm going to update it to Rails 2. That having been said, I did make a backup of the database before bringing it down. So when it returns all of your data will still be there.

Also, I've noticed that I post a lot fewer blog posts these days since I generally vent on my Twitter account, I wind up having not too much left to say. Funny that.

Well, I’ve been a little remiss in my open-source development of late. Many apologies, things have been a bit hectic. You know the feeling, I’m sure.

But that’s not why I’m posting. I thought I’d outline my ideas for the future of these projects and get your feedback and/or ideas.

Comatose, The Micro CMS Plugin

The things that are definitely coming…

Edge Rails – Since Rails 1.2 is now official, it’s time to finally support ‘edge rails’. :-D

Actually, I have a version that runs on Rails 1.2 now, but I’m debating about Rails 1.1 backward compatibility. The new version changes quite a bit. The DEFER_COMATOSE_LOAD stuff goes away, replaced by better configuration support and a Dispatch::to_prepare block. Plus you no longer override the ComatoseAdminController for authentication, instead in the configuration you specify modules to include in the class. Oh yeah, and the controllers no longer extend ApplicationController.

Test Harness – The tests in the plugin itself are very spartan, at best. I have a horribly ugly test harness I use for the actual unit testing that I’m going to clean up and release.

Some possibilities…

Liquid Only – I really think I’m going to drop ERb support. How many of you use ERb over Liquid for page processing?

RESTful Pages – Perhaps using the new RESTfully CRUDDY support would be useful. The idea of having an API for pages is interesting.

Mount Behaviors – I haven’t thought this through yet, it just popped into my head: map.comatose_root 'devblog', :index=>'blog', :behavior=>'blog'

This example would add ‘blog-like’ support such as all children being paged entries (showing last 10, next page, last page, etc.), automatic hAtom microformat support, and maybe some sort of archives… I don’t know. I still haven’t thought about this too much.

The behavior support would be pluggable, much like text-filters and drops… Can you think of any other behavior that would make sense?

Maybe :behavior=>'syndicated' to create RSS/ATOM feeds of the child pages? Perhaps they’d be mixable by saying :behavior=>'blog syndicated' or :behavior=>'blog,syndicated'.

The probably nots…

Media Management – It just feels like too much. I have a hacked up version of Comatose that supports page attachments. But you wind up having to deal with upload directories, and file permissions and… It just feels too heavy. And too heavy != micro.

Perhaps it could be a separate plugin?

TaskTHIS

TaskTHIS is getting a bit long in the tooth. It was written right about the time some of my AJAX patches were being added to Rails. Which was pre 1.0. So, yeah. It needs some love.

It was created as a show-and-tell for the then-new-and-nifty AJAX support. Which, of course, is now old hat.

In keeping with the tradition of show-and-tell, I thought TaskTHIS would be an excellent application to show how to use the new CRUD/REST/Resources stuff in Rails 1.2.

I have a few ideas outlined here. The biggest ones are:

API – This is fairly straight-forward, we’ll get most if it from Rails. We’ll just add the appropriate authentication for the XML requests.

OpenID – I was thinking replacing the existing login system with OpenID authentication. I like the idea of just typing in my domain to login… Who needs passwords? Seriously though, this may be a bit controversial — please weigh in.

Oh, I forgot to mention, TaskTHIS.com is working again.

Theme Support Plugin

Basically, just add any outstanding patches and ensure it works on Rails 1.2. I imagine the routing stuff will need to be tweaked.

Whadda Ya Think?

What would/wouldn’t you like to see in any of these projects?

Well then, lemme catch you up on a few things... I finished up a stint with Site5. I was helping them out on their new offering: Flashback -- Be sure and check 'em out, they're a good bunch of guys 'n gals that really care about web-hosting. [/plug]

There are a couple of patches to the theme_engine that I need to integrate and publish -- look for that in the near future.

In the next few weeks I'm planning on releasing version 0.6 of TaskTHIS. It will fix some issues with Rails 1.0 (probably 1.1 at that point) and have better database support. Also, it'll have some examples of AJAX failure handling (which I'll talk more about in the next few days).

Activity on the Zoo Dot Com front! I'm writing several storylines now so that I can keep well ahead of schedule. And there's something else, very exciting, in the works for ZDC -- I can't tell you about it now, though. Hopefully soon. Very soon.

I guess that's pretty much it -- Oh yeah, I moved too. Heh, a little time consuming that is. Anyway, I will now return to my more regular posting self -- Stay tuned. Same M@ channel, same M@ time. (Did I just say that? Oh jeez...)

TaskTHIS.com is alive! TaskTHIS is now being hosted at DreamHost (yes, that link has a referral code in it, every little thing I can do to keep eating

DreamHost will be whole lot more stable than my development server. I'm going to retire the old demo instance of TaskTHIS (taskthis.darthapo.com) very soon. But, in the meantime, I have upgraded it to 0.5 so that you can export all of your tasklists and import them into taskthis.com.

I've also created a TaskTHIS development blog at blog.taskthis.com. From this point on, information specific to TaskTHIS will be posted there. My general posts and other Rails posts will still be here.

If you need to move your tasklists from the demo instance to taskthis.com, there's a quick tutorial available.

Technorati Tags: rails

TaskTHIS 0.5.1 is ready for download. It implements the following:

• Addresses some PostgreSQL compatibility issues


• Includes ruby-json dependency in vendor folder


• New configuration option: send_emails

That's pretty much it. If you have any issues, please feel free to post a comment here and I'll try and address them as soon as I can.

Technorati Tags: rails

This new release contains:

• Cleaner views (rhtml)


• Enhanced AJAX support


• New GUI


• “Remember Me” login support


• “Send List To...” -- Allows you to send a list to as many as 10 people via email


• Public lists (readonly)


• RSS feeds for public lists


• Better task item reordering


• Moved the database schema to a Migration script


• And much more...

It leverages the following technologies:

• Rails 0.13.1


• Prototype 1.3.1 (Included in Rails)


• Script.aculo.us (Included in Rails)


• Behaviour 1.0

It also contains an early release of my theme engine work. Check back soon for an article explaining how I implement themes in Rails applications.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: rails

Thanks for all the emails asking when the next version of TaskTHIS will be out! I really do appreciate them, it spurs me on to action knowing that you guys find the app useful. I'm sorry I haven't answered them all, it's been kinda crazy lately. I've been trying to sell my house, find another place to live -- Oh, and make a little money so I can eat

All that said, there's a new version of TaskTHIS on the horizon! It's going to have a whole new UI, and quite a few tweaks and new features. Plus, I'm cleaning up the view code. It'll be a lot less 'spaghetti' than before. Check back a little later -- I'll post an image of the new UI.

I don't really want to tie myself down with a specific release date... However, if everything progresses as it has been, then it should be ready by August 1 (yes, 2005).

I'm happy to report that taskthis! has been well received. It has over 1200 registered users! I've gotten a lot of positive response; bugs, suggestions, and feature requests. I appreciate it all.

Originally it was just a tech demo for illustrating how easy it is to use Ajax in Rails... But from the response, and my own usage, I think I'm going to commit a little time and flesh it out.

Oddly enough, the taskthis.com domain was available. So, of course, I snatched it up! That means in the near future it'll have a new home (a textdrive home, at that).

So what does it need to make it 'full-fledged'? ... That wasn't rhetorical, it was a request for feedback! Here's the list, at the moment:

1. Various little cleanups in the UI


2. Fix UTF-8 support


3. Public tasklists (everyone can see)


4. Shared tasklists (multiple users can add/complete taskitems)


5. Pervasive RSS


6. 'Remember Password'


7. Taskitem reordering


8. Tasklist reordering


9. Tasklist merging


10. Taskitem due date (I'm rather leery of this one)


11. Help (seems obvious enough, eh?)

Let me know what features you'd like added to the list.

I thought that since I was involved with the new AJAX stuff in the latest Rails (0.11.1 as of this writing), that I would create a quick demo application showing how to actually use the stuff.

So I present to you taskthis!

Before you roll your eyes and say: “Ugh! Another todo list example?!”, this one is different! Honestly. Sort of. It's using the new Rails (0.11.1) asynchronous AJAX tools. It's using them a lot. Plus, you can download the source and play around with it.

It's been tested on Safari and Mozilla blends (Firefox/Camino), but not too extensively on Windows/IE. So I'd appreciate a shout out if you find any issues there.

Links

• http://taskthis.darthapo.com(demo)


• http://taskthis.darthapo.com/source.html(link to download)