Brian T. Cooke

I’m investigating adding support for creating invoices from time logged in Tickspot to Simply Invoices. The first step of that is to write a ruby wrapper for their API. I’ve created a github project for that and am making it publicly available. You can find it at http://github.com/bricooke/tickspot-ruby. Hopefully someone finds it useful. Or even better, makes it more useful :)

To make it more accessible, it should probably be a gem :/ Baby steps.

Update 4/14/2008: It’s now a published gem. gem install tickspot-ruby

I’m happy to announce that Simply Invoices is now open to everyone. Have at it.

Check out the Simply Invoices blog for more info.

Today I started the semi-private beta for Simply Invoices. I’ve emailed every one that has subscribed to the mailing list with the details of the beta.

If you’re tracking your billable time in Basecamp, and would like to try Simply Invoices, shoot me an email at me@briantcooke.com and just mention that you’d like to join the beta.

The plan is to launch the public release next Tuesday. There are still a few things to tie up, but from what I can tell I’m on track for that date.

Earlier this week, someone asked if the source for mybizexpenses.com was available. At the time, it wasn’t. I’m now happy to say that it is.

Why?

I’m hopeful that this will make mybizexpenses more attractive to people who don’t want to host their expense info on the web. Those folks can now download the source and run it locally on their machine or on a private server of their choosing.

Where?

svn is at: svn://svn.roundhaus.com/roobasoft/mybizexpenses

You can browse the code at: https://roobasoft.roundhaus.com/projects/223-mybizexpenses

Is the hosted version going away?

Nope. That’s where my data is, so I have no plans to get rid of it.

Can I import the data I have stored from the hosted version?

Right now I have no export/import feature. If you want it, ask. Even better, write the code, submit a patch, and then ask me to deploy it ;)

What’s the license?

MIT. See the LICENSE file in the project dir.

Enjoy!

Note about hosting

I’m hosting the mybizexpenses sources on RoundHaus and am loving it. Jonathan Younger, the roundhaus developer, presented RoundHaus at a Boise Ruby Brigade meetup a couple months ago. At that time I got access to the beta and currently have five projects stored in RoundHaus, including the soon to be released Simply Invoices. Only the mybizexpenses project has annonymous access turned on.

RoundHaus is currently in a private beta. I’ll do a proper post on RoundHaus when it’s publicly available, but here are some things get out of it:

• continuous integration (works with rspec)
• nice visualization of code coverage (both at the whole project level and per file)
• ability to run tests against MySQL, SQLite3 or Postgres
• a gorgeous code browser
• equally gorgeous diffs
• super easy svn management (no more svnadmin command for me)
• Twitter notifications for my build status (add in twitterrific and you’ve got an awesome build notification system)

Most of the above features can be seen via the public website. Give it a look an be sure to sign up for the notification when RoundHaus is publicly available (I hear it’ll be soon).

Icon by Erika Greco

Simply Invoices is a project I’ve been working on for about a month. The idea is to create a site where you enter in your basecamp info, select a project and a person and create invoices from the time logged for that person within a given time range. Since I track all my billable time in basecamp, this is something I really wanted.

I’m shooting for a mid-June beta and an early July launch. If you use basecamp to log your billable time, please sign up for the announcement mailing list. The first bunch of folks that sign up will be given access to the beta. There’ll also be discounted pricing for the first month after the site goes live to the public (and that discounted rate will be for the lifetime of your account, not just the 1st month).

I know there are a lot of different time tracking apps out there. Please let me know how you’re tracking your time (either in the comments, or email. I’d like to support as many inputs as makes sense.