brite fisher

Introducing Todoly.net

So, I've been really slacking with the blogging lately, I haven't even been posting my learnings which is a 10 minute process at most. Hopefully I can get back in the habit, no promises though. Okay, so what have I been up to the last little while? Well, I've been working on a little side project app that I recently put up and wanted to talk about a little bit. h2. What is it? Well from the post title you can probably guess it is called "Todoly":http://todoly.net and can by found at "todoly.net":http://todoly.net. "Todoly":http://todoly.net is a really simple todo list application with very few features and is happy that way. I can hear you now, "Why did you bother writing another todo list app, have you not heard of X, Y or Z?". Because I wanted to dammit, that's why. h2. Background More than just wanting to write something I did have a few specific goals that writing "Todoly":http://todoly.net has helped me to achieve. # Build something using Rails 3. # Try out my "Rails App Template":http://github.com/jduff/rails-templates and expand on what is included in it. # Actually finish something and get it deployed publicly. "Todoly":http://todoly.net has done all these things for me and more. I've been able to play around with some of the cool new things in Rails 3 like the new "query interface":http://m.onkey.org/2010/1/22/active-record-query-interface, "unobtrusive javascript":http://railscasts.com/episodes/205-unobtrusive-javascript, "responders":http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/8/31/three-reasons-love-responder and much, much more. I've found a number of bugs in my "app template":http://github.com/jduff/rails-templates and have a few ideas on things I can add to make it more complete. Last, but not least, I got to try out deploying an app to "Heroku":http://http://heroku.com/ (which was amazingly simple) and have it running in the wild. This last point was really important to me and was the main reason for choosing a simple todo list application. I've worked on a number of side projects over the years but never actually released a working application because I got bored with the project, had another idea or life distract me or whatnot. I've released lots of bits and pieces to my "github account":http://github.com/jduff but it feels very different being able to finish a project and put it out there. h2. What's under the hood? "Todoly":http://todoly.net is a pretty straight forward Rails 3 application running locally under MySQL and under PostgreSQL on "Heroku":http://heroku.com in production. I used a number of gems and open source projects include, but not limited to: * "jQuery":http://http://jquery.com/ * "Devise":http://github.com/plataformatec/devise for authentication. * "Simple Form":http://github.com/plataformatec/simple_form to simplify HTML form development. * "CanCan":http://github.com/ryanb/cancan for authorization. * "HTML 5 boilerplate":http://github.com/paulirish/html5-boilerplate (actually "my own fork":http://github.com/jduff/html5-boilerplate that I made for Rails apps) Did I mention that the source for the whole project is up on GitHub so you can "check it out yourself":http://github.com/jduff/todoly if you want. This has already led to some cool stuff, like a friend of mine taking the idea for the app and implementing the same features in "Node.js":http://http://nodejs.org/. You can take a look at that on GitHub as well, "right here":http://github.com/glongman/node-todo. h2. Why is Todoly better than X, Y or Z? In all honesty it probably isn't any better than the other, countless, todo list applications out there. I have been using it regularly for a little while though and like it for a number of reasons. The main reason I like it is the interface is really simple. It's all about adding tasks and completing them, so that's what the interface helps you to do. I added a cool little feature that lets you focus on a groups of tasks by selecting the tag you're interested in. I find this to be all I really need to keep track of what I need to do. Since I have the code and can push a new release whenever I want if there is ever something I need from the application I can just add it. Since the project is open source you can "fork it":http://http://github.com/jduff/todoly and do the same. I'll gladly pull in new features and bug fixes and release them to the main "Todoly.net":http://todoly.net website as well. h2. Where to now? I have a number of features I would like to add to the application such as task reordering, making a better homepage and making some tweaks to clean up the UI a little more. I probably wont get to those until it becomes a problem with my everyday use. Until then I'm going to start working on a native iPhone application that talks to "Todoly":http://todoly.net. I fixed up the styling the other day so that it works pretty well in Safari on the iPhone but going with the same premise for the "Todoly":http://todoly.net web application, I want to actually finish and release an iPhone app. I've already started and the source will also go up on GitHub once I make a little more progress. I'm also going to try and make it so you can point the iPhone application to a different url for it's data, so if you want to run your own "Todoly":http://todoly.net somewhere else or run "glongmans version":http://github.com/glongman/node-todo it should "Just Work" (tm) with those backends. I'm also curious about making a Rails app an Oauth2 provider so I might build this into "Todoly":http://todoly.net to start playing around with that. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of up to date information on doing this so it would be nice to get a good example or even extract a gem out of the work. Anyways, that's all I have to say about "Todoly":http://todoly.net at the moment. Please check it out and let me know what you think, either in the comments here or by sending me an email at jduff@todoly.net.