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Rate my tiny web app: my-foc.us
3 points by mark_l_watson on May 4, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments
I wrote this for my own use, but the app is public at http://my-foc.us (see link at the bottom of this page for the code on github)



Unfortunately in such a crowded market as 'to-do' lists or similar, your site doesn't tell me why it is so special, or what it does.

You don't have a demo, and you make me sign-up to get an intro.

I like the personal style of your writing on the right hand side of the page, and it makes me want to know more, but unfortunately, you haven't provided enough insight into what makes your project special to take me that extra step.


If you are a programmer, clone the code from github.

You are right about a demo, but this is a small project that I really wrote for myself, and shared it (and the code) as an after thought. This is really a 'scratch my own itch' project, like my cookingspace.com site that I use to track my vitamin K input - I could not find any other recipe sites that would do that for me when I wrote cookingspace.

Anyway, thanks for the idea: I'll add a PDF download link tomorrow with screenshots and a page or two of text describing why I did not like any of the other 'getting stuff done' sites.


I should have added in my post: this really is a simple app: uses a bit of Javascript/AJAX to basically keep everything on one page. Drag a focus to the top of the focus list and then you just see the todos for that focus. Click on a focus or a todo title to edit in place. Drag and drop todos and focuses to reorder. Edit notes for any todo in place.

Really simple, this took me about 6 hours to code up. (It is a few hundred lines of Ruby with a few HTML templates, and two CSS files, one for browsers and one for cellphones.)


Thanks for your comment. I added 3 links on the first page for screen shots (2 web browser, 1 on a Droid phone).


You're storing passwords in plain-text. No-no.

May I recommend one of the following:

http://github.com/thoughtbot/clearance http://github.com/binarylogic/authlogic http://github.com/plataformatec/devise


Right you are, thanks. I'll fix that. I'll probably leave the email code as-is and add a random salt for each account, run crypt and just save the salt and hash for each user.


I just added a few lines of code to migrate the database to encrypt passwords with a per user salt (not the best salt, but adds some flavor :-)

Thanks again for pointing that out.


I didn't see a demo, and when I went to create a login there was a large message in red that said "Sorry, new accounts are not available at this time".


yes a demo as others would be great !

Until that is done , the rest can use user : test@test.com pass : test To see what it does !

Also when i reorder the list ,it would be nice if the edit wouldnt pop up !


I added 3 links to screen shots (one from an Android phone) on the front page so people can also et a quick idea of what the app does.

re: when I reorder the list it would be nice if the edit wouldn't pop up:

The help text tells you how to work around this: just grab a focus or a todo item with the mouse just to the right of the text to drag it, otherwise you get both drag and drop and in place editing. I thought of requiring a ctrl key with a mouse click to get around this problem, but once I got used to mousing down just next to the text to drag, that seemed easy. (I need to make the help text more clear.)

Thanks for your comments.


Sorry, I will fix that in about 45 seconds.


Fixed: that warning message just had to be removed. Creating login accounts works. If you get the source code from github, read the README for a one line change to enable email new account authentication (I disabled this so people could try it instantly, with no email handshake).




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