
Show HN our weekend project: an email based productivity log - rguzman
http://idonethis.com
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magicseth
It's funny how similar in implementation this could be to OhLife, and yet how
different a feeling it has. It is really interesting to take the exact same
technology, put a different story in front of it, and be amazed the entire new
audience you have just discovered.

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jat850
Out of curiosity, did you consider skipping the signup requirement/process?
Instead, just having a user put in their e-mail address as the only step?

Then it might work like this: 1) user enters email 2) you send daily "What
have you done" emails to that address, they reply (which you can uniquely key
to your database/calendar) 3) you email out the intended results, or if at a
later time a user wants to log into the site to see a fancy
calendar/history/graphs/charts, etc., at that time they could complete the
signup process

I wouldn't say the signup is prohibitive in any way, and I admittedly did not
investigate what features are part of being logged into the site - just a
thought as less burden on signups seems to be a growing trend.

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kurin
> I wouldn't say the signup is prohibitive in any way

I would. I didn't sign up. The concept looked interesting, but there was no
real information on this side of the sign-up wall. For me, there really is a
mental effort in establishing One More Relationship with One More Website.

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smalter
how about sticking an image of what the calendar will look like on the main
page? there is really all that much to explain about the site otherwise --
it's simple. (the mental energy of having to deal with one more site we hope
is mitigated by the fact that we email you, you don't have to remember to
check out our site.)

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lfx
Hi, you should add email sending time to chose. Because I'm in Europe and now
in the morning (6am) I've got mail saying "What'd you get done today?". I'v
just barely woke up ;)

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rguzman
yeah, we just wanted to get it off the ground quickly. we will add timezone
support soon.

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ZeroMinx
Looks interesting. Few initial thoughts;

\- I'd really like to see a demo or something before signing up (classic "Show
HN" feedback)

\- Even signing up wont show me how this will work, as I will have to wait for
my first email. Right now all I get is an empty calendar

\- My calendar appears public. As I haven't received a reminder email yet I
don't know what information will be public, but I'd personally like to keep a
log like this private (or possibly be able to flag which items should be
public)

\- Perhaps the calendar data could be exported to Google calendar and/or other
calendars people use?

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rguzman
Thanks for the feedback. We were just discussing your first two points --
we'll do something about it soon.

As for the public vs private calendars, we weren't sure what people would
prefer: public, private, or option. So, we opted for what we have until
further notice. I'll put do you down as wanting the calendar private.

~~~
kareemm
Second the bit about private calendars. To me this is about tracking my own
productivity across all kinds of contexts (work, play, gym, diet); I can't
even fathom a reason why I'd want to make data that span those contexts
available to anybody / everybody.

The other bit of feedback - I have to wait a whole day until the app starts
showing value. How can you make it add value immediately? What about sending
me an email and asking me what I did yesterday? Or letting me enter it right
on the site, since otherwise I gotta go fire up my email client?

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smalter
Two excellent points. We'll most likely implement both. Thanks.

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lost-theory
Getting an error after registration:

NoReverseMatch at / Reverse for 'dailydone_calendar' with arguments '()' and
keyword arguments '{'username': u'.....'}' not found.

edit: my username has a dash '-' in it, maybe your URL regex isn't catching it

edit2: also you shouldn't run with DEBUG on

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rguzman
Thanks! Both should be fixed.

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aquilax
Unfortunately doesn't work with Cyrillic characters. I got this in the
calendar

"=C7=E0=EF=EE=F7=ED=E0=F5"

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rguzman
argh... pesky email stuff. i'll look into this soon.

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steveklabnik
Cool! I've just started doing something like this, but just for myself. It's
based on lionhearted's time tracking efforts... so it's interesting to see
others building things around recording your productivity.

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jtchang
Tried to do registration but got an Internal Server Error. Not sure if my
registration went through or not. (My e-mail is in my profile).

~~~
smalter
Thanks for the heads up. This was fixed. Rodrigo dropped you an email.

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rguzman
smalter, peng, and I put this together to scratch personal itches and help us
keep our new year's resolutions.

Any feedback is welcome.

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sz
I've been looking for something like this!

