Brian T. Cooke

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.

I have an automator workflow that I’ve been using that others might find useful. It’s heavily based off of the web20show’s own script (original here). The biggest difference (if I remember right) is my flow takes the project directory as an argument vs. asking for it. It opens 3 iTerm tabs. 1 running ./script/server, 1 running autotest and 1 just sitting in your projects directory. localhost:3000 is then opened in your default browser (usually before the web server is ready) and TextMate is opened with the interesting directories loaded in (does not open ‘logs’ or ‘vendor’ or stuff like that).

For a long time I ran this as a Finder plugin. That required finding the project in Finder, right clicking on it and saying Automator -> RailsWork. Lately I’ve switched over to having the workflow be a .app and opening my project folder with that .app via QuickSilver.

I have a 48 second screencast of that in action. And of course, the workflow is available too: RailsWork.workflow.zip

update about requirements: The workflow uses TextMate, iTerm and requires TextMate be setup with its ‘mate’ command described here.

I had the need to highlight some words in some text. I started digging for a plugin to do this and then just some ruby code. Then I finally typed ‘highlight’ into gotapi.com and found this function in ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper:

highlight(text, phrase, highlighter = '\1')

The lesson I learned (again) was to always check the docs first!

mybizexpenses.com was feeling really slow the past week or two. The problem was that it was on the same slice as all my other active projects (3 other rails apps (1 mongrel each)) and had to fight for resources (only 256MB of RAM on the slice). To help with this, I purchased another slice and mybizexpenses is currently all alone. Things should be much more responsive now.

If you get the “down for maintenance” message, it’ll go away once the DNS change propagates through the tubes.

Enjoy!

Oh, and while I was testing the new environment I noticed I have quite a few IE bugs in the AJAX stuff. I’ll fix that up when I get a chance (sorry).