Tracks

January 1, 2009 — Antoine Toulme

One of my resolutions for 2009 is to have a working system to organize myself. I need to empty my mind somewhere, and paper solutions don’t work anymore.
I also have issues with scheduling items. I don’t have so much to plan, I really need to use deadlines though.

I tried Remember the milk in the past. It’s super easy, but you need to enter a subscription to access the iphone interface.

I also tried using SugarCRM, but the interface is too complex.

I headed to Chandler, tried the desktop application, installed the server. I didn’t like having one more application running on the laptop, as nice as it looks. The server was consuming quite a lot of memory too, and my modest VPS didn’t like it.

I tried the tasks list in gmail ; not too convinced yet, it’s lacking features to organize items.

Tracks

I found Tracks by accident. I was looking if somebody had done a todo list with Rails, before I started eventually having to do one.

It looks awesome. It has a good multi-user support, you can manage projects, you can create tasks with contexts, you can share them. You can publish them in ical format or RSS.

Installing Tracks on your VPS

To install Tracks, I downloaded the latest release, unzipped it in a directory owned by www-data, and used Passenger for the configuration:

<VirtualHost 67.207.128.50>
   DocumentRoot /var/tracks/public
   ServerAdmin admin@localhost
   ServerName tracks.lunar-ocean.com
   ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/tracks-error.log
   CustomLog /var/log/apache2/tracks-access.log combined
   <Directory /var/tracks/public>
      AllowOverride All
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

I tried using MySQL as the backend for the application, but there was an error while creating the database schema. Using Sqlite, as it is recommended by default, works just fine.

If there was really something to complain about…

I spotted a few inconveniences so far:
Tracks is licensed as GPL. That’s a problem for me when I intend to build on software that uses this license, that shouldn’t be the case for me.
Deadlines can be set on dates only, you can’t give them a particular time. I’ll try looking at the code and proposing a patch to the Tracks team if that helps.

Posted in Intalio. No Comments »