MyChores Journal

After a heavy afternoon working on the MyChores API i decided to do something fun for a bit of light relief!

If you have a lot of tasks to do and don’t really know where to start, try the Lucky dip! It will choose a random task that is assigned to you and either due today or overdue. Just as if you’d picked it out of a hat!

I was inspired by this: Computerized “Job-Jar”?. It seemed to me that MyChores wasn’t exactly what this person was looking for, but now with the new Lucky dip feature, perhaps it could be! :)

Last week i made OpenID registration easier; today i have made traditional registration easier, using reCAPTCHA.

No more entering ‘H6a38G’ or whatever code it was that i mangled in the GIMP several years ago! I had quite a few emails about that, from people who couldn’t read the code and there was no alternative. Now we get a nice simple easy-to-understand box like this:

Several things are nice about this:

1. If you can’t read the text you can re-load for another try
2. It is accessible - there is an audio alternative
3. It is secure, tried and tested on many sites
4. It was easy-peasy for me to implement!
5. You don’t have to get it exactly right, just near enough
6. It apparently helps to turn old books into digital format

Pretty impressive, hey! I was most impressed by point number 5. I entered ‘Manhatten’ instead of ‘Manhattan’ and it allowed it. I also missed an ’s’ off one word and it still worked. Only if you get it drastically wrong does it fail and ask you for another try. I am pleased by this.

In other news, i am working on extending the MyChores API. I am trying to see whether it is possible to re-write MyChores Mobile to use the API, which would save me having to maintain two codebases. If it works, i’ll also make a proper effort on MyChores for Kids.

Oh yes, whilst i’m thinking about MyChores for Kids … would it be useful to anyone to have a currency field where you could enter an amount of pocket money that could be earned for doing chores? When i get on to reporting i could include a pocket money report … let me know if that could be useful!

The subject of this post was the subject of an email i received at the weekend. The ever-awesome JanRain have launched another OpenID product, called ID Selector to make OpenID more obvious and easier than ever.

I have added the simple DHTML plugin to the OpenID registration screen, which works a dream, and makes it very easy to register and login using OpenID.

I am a huge fan of OpenID, and anything that makes the web easier to use, so i have made a quick video demo of how to register on MyChores using an OpenID.

For anyone who wants to associate their existing account with an OpenID, to login without needing a password, you can do that here: Associate your account with an OpenID.

Have you ever wished your workload list would auto-refresh itself? Well now it can. Just go into your Preferences - Workload Preferences and set the “Auto-refresh workload” option. By default it is set to “never”, but you can have every minute, five minutes or ten minutes, depending what you think would be useful.

I thought somebody had suggested this, but in fact it looks as if i thought of it myself! If anyone wants to stake a claim to this suggestion, go ahead! I’m sure this will be particularly useful to the ‘advanced’ users with many teams and many people to manage.

The refresh also works on the calendar, hot map, collage and statistics views.

It just occurred to me that i could make a really useful enhancement to the search page. When you search for tasks you will now get them ordered by due date (the due date also appears for you) and you can tick them off right from the search page. It’s like a mini filtered workload list.

So i’ve got the vacuum cleaner out and i know i’m going to be ticking off all my vacuuming tasks, i can simply search for ‘vacuum’ and get the results like this:

If you have JavaScript enabled you can have the tick-and-fade effect just like in the workload list, meaning you don’t lose your search results. I think this will be very helpful.

I guess i’ll be off to vacuum the kitchen then! :P

Oh, there was one other change. When exporting tasks to a spreadsheet, the description field is now included too. I forget who asked for that feature. I hope it is helpful. It doesn’t handle multi-line fields very well due to the limitations of .csv files, but hopefully it will suit most peoples needs.

We are now up and running with Rails 2.0.2. There were a few unforseen difficulties along the way, and you will probably need to login again. We are now storing session information in the database rather than cache in your browser. This turns out to be more secure.

The American English spellings are ready and our friends in America should already see the changes. It’ll be a while before we can start to translate into other languages because i need to make all the files aware of the globalization plugin. For now i have just done the words phrases that we needed for American spelling.

Please visit our new statistics page to see the glorious new Google Charts. I am really pleased with these! Your personal statistics page should also look a bit prettier for you now, with a nice little sparkline chart showing the tasks you have completed recently. This is mine:

I guess i do most of my chores on Sundays, heh! :)

MyChores Mobile is lagging behind, but i don’t think anybody uses it. I am planning to completely re-write it, making it use the API instead of having its own separate code-base. I’m not sure when this will happen, but it probably needs to be soon.

If you find anything wrong please do get in touch!

I am very excited about some enhancements coming very soon! Firstly, let me tell you about something i released last month but kept quiet about it: in-place editing. You can now edit a task’s title and due date from your workload list without going to the edit page. It needs a setting activated in Preferences - Workload Preferences. Ensure JavaScript is enabled and tick on the in-place editing for the fields you wish to have quick-edit-ability. Many thanks to Jennifer for suggesting and testing this.

Now for the new stuff!

We are about ready to move to Rails 2.0.2. This doesn’t mean much to any of us except the site will hopefully run a bit faster. One consequence of moving up is the old paging functionality is no longer supported. This is the main reason i didn’t switch until now. The good thing about this is that i have implemented a new paging plugin which looks rather like Flickr, Del.icio.us, et al.

A reminder (because you will soon forget!) of how it looks currently:

How it will look in the near future:

I don’t think any of us will miss the old version; this one is so much easier to use!

Another great thing i have discovered is Google Chart. Our statistics page is soon have a beautiful revamp. It means we can do cute things like this on the welcome page:

This is the number of tasks completed in the last 28 days. You can see the dip where we had that major outage earlier this month. Obviously this one won’t update, but the charts on the site will update in real-time.

Finally … i am so hyped up about this one … localisation is coming! We are about ready to go live with American English, meaning that you can have ‘Help center’, ‘color’, ‘localization’ etc showing up with the American spelling. It’ll be a configurable option, but anyone whose time zone is in America will get set to American English by default.

The really exciting thing about this is … before too long we’ll be able to translate the entire site into multiple languages. When i say ‘we’ i actually mean ‘you’! If you want to translate MyChores into your own language, you will have the option to do it. I will explain more when the time comes! :)

Sorry to the people who were still using the old RSS feed address. I think i lost the URL rewrite rule when i upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. This would be why MyChores journal has not been syndicating on LiveJournal for a few weeks. I’m very sorry about that, especially during this troubled week when you could have done with knowing what was going on. It should be working again now.

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I am happy to report that MyChores is finally back on track and working as it should. The emails are going out and the OpenID functionality has been restored. Actually, there was a bit of code tweaking to be done to be compatible with a newer version of the ruby-openid gem so i’m glad that’s done now.

Thank you ever so much for your patience this week.

The email issue has been sorted and emails are coming through now. We have an idea of a fix for the OpenID issue, which i will try this evening.

Many thanks for your patience.