Recent changes..

I’ve been busy the last couple of days, and it’s now possible to collapse/expand a client on the Overview page, Browse supports task grouping and sorting, users can have custom avatars, and both Overview and Browse have gotten a speedup.

In my case, Overview went from 1.7 seconds to 0.7 seconds, and Browse from 1.2 to 0.5 seconds. Quite nice for an evenings worth of optimizing (mostly :include but also a few TimeZone fixes, and rewriting so I use user.project_id.to_i == 0 instead of user.project.nil?

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Darcs again…

For some reason, Darcs has started insisting that I’ve removed / emptied out some files that most certainly are there. This happened after I moved a plugin temporarily to disable it, then did some records, then moved the plugin back to re-enable it.

And now, I’m told the plugin is gone every time I record some changes. Git is still doing the right thing and didn’t get confused at all.

I guess it’s time to switch soon.

Forums!

I’ve integrated Beast into ClockingIT, allowing for installation/company/project-wide discussions. Looks great, and seems to work without any problems. I did have to munge it a bit to make it work with my current model, but no major surgery was needed. I also had to add some more security to limit regular administrators from messing with the public forums.

Anyways, here’s a simple screenshot from my development version.

Source Control

I’ve been mostly happy with my choice of Darcs for ClockingIT source control, even though it’s gotten slower and slower. But, today I ended up with a broken repository after aborting a conflicting pull. That’s not supposed to happen ever. So, I’ve converted the whole history to Git with Tailor, and am going to try using that for a while before I possibly swap.

I just need to wrap my head around all the git commands and try not to break things too often. 🙂

iCalendar feeds

Last weekend I sat down and implemented iCalendar feeds for your projects. There are several to select from, both personal and for all people in your ClockingIT company.

After finding the icalendar gem for Ruby and reading a bit of documentation, implementation was a breeze. What took most time was finding an export format that contained correct information so that Google Calendar could parse it. It seems that if you use an end time of less then an hour, Google Calendar sets it to one hour, but if you specify a duration it gets it right. The gem also output the wrong tag for a VTODO percentage, but that was easily fixable with a gsub.

The end result is that Google Calendar now polls my feeds once a day, and I get a nice view of the work I log and the tasks I close. And as I split different information into different feeds, I can filter the view easily to see just the information I’m looking for.

Update time…

It’s been a while since I’ve written any thing here, so here’s a short run down of what’s happened to ClockingIT lately.

• Tasks can have dependencies
• Tasks can repeat daily, weekly, monthly, on a specific day, on a specific day of a specific week, or after a number of days
• Files are no longer stored in the database, making for easier backups and allowing for larger uploads
• Uploaded logos are resized if they’re too large
• Some of the filtering select boxes are merged into a single one, with highlights and indenting to easily find what you’re looking for

It’s all committed to my darcs repository, so feel free to test before I deploy in a couple of days.