If things feel zippier to you, it’s because I’ve been tweaking the tracks.tra.in deployment a bit; the biggest change is that we’re trying out Ruby Enterprise Edition. I’ve been pretty impressed with the responsiveness of the site, but let me know if this causes any problems for you. Thanks!
Sorry everyone — our host Slicehost, which has usually been very good wrt uptime, had a whole bunch of trouble with packet loss this morning, and then later this afternoon. They took down the data center where we’re located (STL-A) for “emergency network maintenance” this afternoon, but the network seems to be up and humming smoothly now (you can track Slicehost’s status at status.slicehost.com).
I should make it clear that the server and your data were never at risk, just your connectivity to it. Apologies to all for the downtime: though we’ve been very happy with Slicehost in the past, we’re exploring spreading our system across different providers in the future.
The ability to send new todos via SMS and email works with the new version of Tracks now; sorry that it was disabled until now. I’ve also tweaked the CSS slightly and enabled OpenID. Let me know if there are any issues with the new version!
tracks.tra.in has been upgraded to the latest Tracks 1.7 branch, which brings with it the following new features (from the official release notes):
Sorry to everyone for how long it took for this upgrade — lately I have been very busy proposing my thesis. Upgrading the DB for Tracks 1.7 had been giving me some trouble when I’d tried it in the past, but this time I posted a planned outage warning, took the site down for a few hours, and upgraded cleanly without having to worry about out-of-sync data.
I’ll write more about more new features the upgrade provides soon! Please let me know if you have encounter any problems with the upgrade.
[Back-posted to commit date] A number of my patches were accepted on this day by the Tracks team – turns out Github really is a great way to collaborate on open source projects! I’m glad to have finally made some (admittedly tiny) contributions back to the Tracks project.
Here are the patches, all added on 3/31: add an alternate new_todo API call; enable the much-requested “open signups” feature; clean up the appearance of text and ical feeds; remove the “these preferences should be self-explanatory” message; and some CSS tweaks (a patch to move the right sidebar all the way to the right, another tracks.tra.in CSS tweak, was already added by another developer shortly before my patches). Thanks to Reiner Balt for commiting them!
Many of you use the site’s email/SMS feature to quickly jot down and send in your todos when you’re on the run. Unfortunately, in the past these todos may have been lost if your mobile phone service, SMS-to-email bridge, or mail client doesn’t correctly put your secret “add new todo” email address in your message’s “To:” field.
Also, some crafty users have tried in the past to use fancy email address aliasing or forwarding (say, newtodo@myemail.com) to save the trouble of having to remember your secret token.
This didn’t work correctly in the past: without a correct “To:” address, our servers couldn’t add your new action to your account. Well, now it does work! Hope this helps all of you with fancy todo-emailing setups out there.
Several people have asked me how to set up open signups for their private Tracks deployments, so I added a new FAQ entry for that. I should put these changes on github, but I haven’t figured out how to push to my fork yet.
When I do, I’ll push another Tracks hack written last year, but never deployed — Javascript-based AES encryption of todos and notes using the Clipperz library. The trouble with it was: it was hard to see why a suspicious user (typical of one wanting to use encryption) would trust it!
In other news, tracks.tra.in has expanded to using a dedicated MySQL slice at Slicehost, in addition to the 2GB slice that Rails runs on. I’m considering offering separate, faster database support for users paying more than $1/month — basically like buying a timeshare on a private MySQL slice (let me know if that’s something you’d sign up for).
Hi all — we upgraded the server running tracks.tra.in last week, and in the process disabled the add-todos-via-email feature. Many apologies to those who tried to add new items unsuccessfully during this time; the problem is fixed now. For those who are looking to retrieve an important idea or note mailed during this period, we can replay these lost emails from our queue; just email me with your token. Again, very sorry for the inconvenience.
chris
Tracks 1.6 was released a little while ago, adding two main new features: a search box for your data, and improved mobile support. For those of you who didn’t notice, there’s been a lightweight mobile interface to Tracks available at tracks.tra.in/mobile since the last upgrade.
This new version looks better on the iPhone, so it’s the default for the mobile view, but hasn’t been deployed yet on the main site. If you want to try it, please visit tracks16.tra.in, where I’ve been testing out Tracks 1.6 with some mobile t.t.in users who’d emailed about it. Your login is the same as on t.t.in, and any changes or new todos will appear immediately in both versions.
Finally, apologies for taking so long to mention this on the blog; just got back from two weeks (well, more like a week and a half) on tour. Stay tuned for: questionably secure Javascript-based encryption, and slightly better iPhone support.
This week we upgraded the server hosting tracks.tra.in to a collossal 2GB slice at Slicehost! Since last year we’d been running on a 1GB slice, and have been really happy with the service we’re getting. If you want to host Tracks for yourself and can administer your own server, I’d strongly recommend Slicehost; please mention chris@tra.in or use this link if you’d like me to earn a small commission.
Since we have twice as much RAM, I increased the size of MySQL’s query cache and InnoDB buffer pool. This should improve performance overall, but fast database access only goes so far — Tracks spends most of its time in Rails, rendering as HTML the data provided by MySQL. My logs show faster DB times, but let me know if you noticed anything.