Recent fixes and improvements to GoalsOnTrack

First off, I’d like to thank all the users who have taken the time to send me warm feedback and great suggestions. I appreciate your continuing interest and support for the site. That’s one of the reasons that I have been working hard to make it as best as I can.

There have been some updates to the site this week. My main focus has been to get the site working correctly in Internet Explorer 6.0. If you using IE6 on PC, you should notice that the site is both looking and working alright now, although there may be still something not working exactly as it should as in other more standard compliant browsers, such as Firefox, or IE7.

I haven’t been able to test the site under IE6/7 on Mac. If you happen to have such combinations on your computer, please let me know if you find any problems with the site.

Another fix is the timezone related issue. Sometimes for some users, the tasks created under a timezone weren’t showing correctly as “Today”, or “Yesterday” etc. This problem has been fixed, and please tell me if you still see anything weird about the task dates.

I’ve been able to add a “Note” field to the task. This is an optional field. If it is filled, you will see a small (i) icon next to the task on dashboard. Clicking it will reveal the note data. This field is added because some users want to enter addtional info about a task, such as a phone number, or a web link etc.

I am getting good ideas from you almost daily. I just want you to know that I take them very seriously, and most likely they will be implemented in the coming releases.

It’s near the end of month, hope everybody’s still sticking to the new year resolutions.

Cheers,
Harry

Problems with the site shown in IE6.x browsers

I recently realized that some users are having problem viewing the site in correct layout/format under IE6.x browsers. This is mainly because the site’s CSS was developed and tested on IE7, Firefox and Safari browsers. Due to some web standard incompatibility issues (or bugs) of IE5-6 and below browsers, some of the CSS rules are not applied and rendered as expected as in other browsers.

I will be refactoring the CSS code to make it work with IE6 browsers. In the meanwhile, if you have browsers other than IE6(on Windows) installed, such as Firefox, please avoid using IE6 to get the best result in using the site.

Set your own time zone

As many of you have requested, the function to set your own time zone has been added to the site.

Now for new signups, you will have the option of selecting your time zone on the sign up form. But for existing users, because there was no way to set time zone when you signed up, so all old accounts now have the default time zone of “Pacific Time (US and Canada)”.

If this is not your time zone, you can change your default setting(or the one you selected when signing up) by clicking “Settings” and then “Account Info”.

Let me know if this is all working for you, espcially if you are using the site from outside of US and Canada.

Thanks,
Harry

Updates to the New Year release

Hope everybody has had a wonderful new year holiday!

First of all, thank you all who have taken the time to try out the new version of GOT website. Since the beginning of the new year, I have received from you a lot of warm cheers and many useful suggestions. I am glad this small web app can be useful to people.

There have been some minor updates to the codebase since the new year release. Some are just bug fixes, and others are functional improvements. Briefly, they are:

1. Bug fix in showing accomplished and backburned goals for some users.
2. Added more db indexes to reduce the load time of certain pages.
3. Bug fix in jounal archive names.
4. Bug fix in generating recurring tasks.
5. Bug fix in timestamp field when completing a task.
6. Now goal name can be same as long as only one in active goals.
7. Link to show all tasks if completed tasks more than 5.
8. “Remember me” feature.
9. Time reports now show actual hours spent on goals.
10. Different text colors for different task priorities.
11. Bug fix in search feature in journal.
12. Dashboard shows tags before the task names.
… …

There are some other minor performance related updates to the code, but they seem too trivial to list them all here.

Another thing is the site has not been very stable during the past week, I am still trying many different things to make it as fast and stable as possible. And this inevitably will involve rebooting the server from time to time. If you ever experience difficulty connecting the site, or it’s becoming very slow, just wait for a few minutes and try again later. Hopefully all these server related performance issues will be resolved in the next week.

As always, please don’t hesitate to let me know how you would like the site to work, or anything you think would be useful for you. I will try my best to integrate all these feature requests into the next release.

New version launched!

GoalsOnTrack’s new version has been officially launched today.

You should be able to login and use the site using your current login and password. All data you have entered in the old version persists in the new version, though the layout and look-and-feel are different now.

If you can’t login or access your data in the new version, please let me know immediately and I will make sure it’s fixed asap.

Please test around and give the new version a try. Let me know if you have found any bugs or have any suggestions.

Thanks and Happy New Year to You All!

Christmas release

It has been a bit quiet lately on the blog, that’s because I have been focusing on getting this new release done for the past few days. There’re just two days away from Christimas, and a new version is almost ready. Actually the backend is pretty much done already for the production. However, I am still working on several front end items, such as some new screenshots, testimonials etc.

Although I have been trying to test the code as thoroughly as possible, there still could be bugs or minor glitches here and there. I will probably have to deal with them after this release is in production.

Another thing is with the new feature of uploading pictures for goals. I will need to test it all out on a staging server first before the code goes live. If everything goes well, that shouldn’t take long, otherwise, there could be a slight delay. Anyway, I think the new version will probably be out around Christmas, and everyone should be able to see and use the new version before the new year.

Let it snow, let it snow

We had a big snow storm around Vancouver yesterday.  This is probably the biggest snowfall I’ve ever seen since I came to live here. Everything is totally white, and everything looks very different from what I used to see everyday. Here are few pictures of the snow, hope you like them.

New look for the home page

I’ve been working on a new design for the home page. The problem with the old(current) design is that it lacks certain critial components, such as navigation) and also the colors do not look very good as well.

I’ve attached a screenshot of the new design, here is how it looks at this moment. My original idea was to make it simple and clean so that visitors will not get distracted by unimportant things except taking the tour and signing up.  Hope this new look somehow is an improvement to the current home page. Let me know if you have any suggestions or comments.

100 Terrific Web Tools for Meeting Your Personal and Career Goals

There seem to be so many web sites or tools that you can use for all kinds of things nowadays. But do you know which of them are the best and most easy to use. especially for college students?

Here is a list for 100 web tools for meeting your personal career goals, compiled by the friends at Online College Blog. Check it out here. (Thanks for including goalsontrack.com on your list too, Kelly!)

A brief down time

There has been a brief down time, about 5-10 minutes, on the hosting server this morning. It happened around 6am. It seemed like some uninitialized object had caused mongrel processes to fail. But it has been corrected now.

For those of you who are interested in the backend setup, the site is running on a dedicated linux server, with Apache/2.2.9 as web server, and 2 mongrel clusters as app servers. The site itself is coded in Ruby on Rails, and the database is running on MySQL 5.

If you’re a web developer or techie person, you may want to check out my other blog at http://harryche2008.wordpress.com/ where I occasionally post RoR and web development related stuff.