Best Practical

Repeating tasks. Repeating tasks. Repeating tasks.

Hiveminder now supports repeating tasks.  Right now, you can only set up repeating events if you've told us you want to beta test user.

But don't despair! You can turn on beta features whenever you'd like. Just visit your Hiveminder preferences page and click the "Beta features" checkbox and hit save.

You can make any task start repeating just by clicking on the task in a list and then clicking the "Repeat" tab.  Once you get over the abject horror of the spartan user interface, you'll find that it's pretty easy to say how often the task should repeat (daily, weekly, monthly or annually), how much notice you have before the task repeats and most importantly whether repeats should stack up.

There are two kinds of repeating todos in this world: things you can get away with skipping now and again and paying the rent. If your repeating task is something innocent like "remember to take out the trash" and you let it go for a week, you don't need two tasks telling you to "Take out the garbage" task next week -- Just a kick in the pants. If, on the other hand, you forget to pay the rent, we're going to make damn sure that those tasks "stack up" so you know  you owe your landlord two checks. 

Repeating events are most definitely still a "beta" feature. Only three of us have ever used them. We want to know that they do what you need before we tell the world:

  "Yes! We'll remind you to change the batteries in your smoke alarms for the next 10 years!"

It's time to start putting in:

    Pay the rent [due: november 1]
    Take out the trash [due: next tuesday]
    Finish doing my taxes [due: February 1]
    Feed the cat [due: tomorrow]

And once they're in there once, you'll never have to do it again.

Hey buddy, can you spare two bits?

We've been opening up our code a bit lately. I know that sounds weird coming from an open source company, but we've traditionally been very, very cautious with who
gets a "commit bit" to our products.  Only two or three people outside Best Practical have commit rights to RT.  SVK has a richer cast of characters.  With Jifty, we've fully embraced Audrey Tang's methodology. When she's feeling confrontational, she calls it "Anarchistic Development." When she's talking to folks with a more Web 2.0 bent, she calls it "Wiki Style Development".  Just about anybody who shows up has commit privileges thrust upon them.  It's worked amazingly well for Pugs. So we figured we'd try it for Jifty.

If we were hosting Jifty somewhere like SourceForge or Google Code, we could just add people by email address and the system would take care of sending them email, getting them a password and so on.  We really prefer to host things locally, which left us in a bit of a vacuum. We couldn't find a single good tool for handing out commit bits and managing projects in a Subversion repository.

I bet you can tell where this is going.

We've got another new project.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please allow me to present CommitBit, a subversion access management system with built in support for a "code.example.com" project directory.

CommitBit lets you, the administrator, set up repositories and projects through a simple web interface. You can grant an individual  a commit or admin bit to a specific project just by typing his or her email address into CommitBit's web ui.  Project administrators can, somewhat unsurprisingly, grant commit or admin bits to others through the same interface.  CommitBit takes care of notifying the new project member, setting up their password and so on.

On the backend, CommitBit can set up new subversion repositories or work with preexisting local repositories. It manages a bunch of files so you don't have to:

• htpasswd files for svn over WebDAV
• passwd files for svnserve
• authz files that work with both
• an apache2 configuration snippet

On the "codedot" side, you a project listing, the ability to spotlight whatever's currently hot and per-project overview pages with lists of committers, pointers to your bug tracker, wiki, mailing lists, Subversion repository, repository browser and so on.

If you're interested in CommitBit, you can find out more about it at code.bestpractical.com:

http://code.bestpractical.com/project/CommitBit