3 posts tagged “highrise”

Not long ago, I switched to TextDrive after being let down by a cheaper web host. So far, it’s been great…it’s a lot more feature rich and the people over there really know what they’re doing.

The basic $8/month plan includes access to 5GB of file storage for backup/sharing/whatever. I use it to back up regular ol’ documents and files on a daily basis.

They make this easy to do with a UNIX tool called rsync that compresses and transfers only the files that have changed. rsync is the real workhorse here, but I’ve rigged up a backup solution that utilizes all of the following tools:

• rsync – does the actual file transfer
• ssh keys – used to avoid entering manual passwords, which enables scripting
• Automator – ties together the scripts into an application
• iCal – enables scheduling of the application
• Growl – provides notification onscreen that the script ran
• Highrise – keeps a running history of the activity and provides RSS access

To cut to the case, download this file and check out the scripts. For more detail, read on.

This idea uses the UNIX philosophy of employing many small tools each perfectly suited for their job. (I love it.) Let’s take it step by step.

1. rsync – It’s easy to familiarize yourself with this portion, since you can run it “interactively” on the command line. I do something very similar to what this gentleman did, though I supply slightly different options to rsync as per the recommendations of the Strongspace folks.
2. ssh keys – If you play with rsync for a while, you’ll see that it asks for a password when you run it. Since we want to script this, we can’t have that, now can we? Fortunately it’s easy to generate ssh keys, which basically make your computer and your Strongspace account “trust each other” so that checking ID isn’t necessary.
3. Automator – This part is pretty easy…I use Automator in OS X to string together the basic sequence of steps: backup the files, send the log to Highrise, and flash a Growl notification. Download this file to check it out.
4. iCal – I chose to use iCal to schedule the Automator action (using this basic method) rather than a daemon like cron because it seemed like a more natural, Mac-like fit.
5. Growl – I’ll be honest, this step is mostly for fun…Growl is just good times. However, I do use it as a quick validation that iCal lauched the script.
6. Highrise – Growl is cool, but it didn’t provide much in the way of detail as to what happened with the script. I kinda wanted to see a log of what happened, except I didn’t feel like managing log files. I was really looking to get the log info via RSS, and for that I had to post it to the web somewhere. Highrise solves all these issues, and the default Dashboard view is great in the way it highlights the latest info. (After all, I really don’t care about yesterday’s backup after today.) My script e-mails the contents of the log file to my Highrise Dropbox, which was really easy to do with just a few lines of Ruby code.

So far, this has worked without a hitch, and I feel much better having my files backed up everyday.

I've gone back to putting everything into 37signals apps after a brief honeymoon with other tools. The 37signals stuff just works too well to use anything else.

My current approach is to use Highrise for work stuff and Backpack for personal stuff...it's a pretty good split. I find that work is more people-oriented (call this person, e-mail this person, etc.) and home stuff best organized by keeping track of lots of little lists and bits of data. It's also kinda nice to keep them separated so you're not thinking about work all the time.

Anyway, besides keeping lists, I also get a lot of use out of Backpack's reminders at home. It's great for reminding you about little domestic things like picking up stamps and paying your credit card bill. My problem is short term memory...if I think of it, I've got to write it down immediately. This is especially true if I'm on the go.

To deal with this problem, I've written a little bit of Ruby code that creates a reminder when I send an e-mail to a certain address. I did something like this a while ago, but at the time I didn't have a way to run the code without constantly polling a POP account for new messages (which is no good). Thanks to the fact that I've now switched to TextDrive for web hosting, I can call my script when an e-mail comes in, which is much more reliable. (The message is fed to the script via good ol' STDIN...nice.)

The script tries to be a bit clever and interpret text like "Call Mom tuesday 5pm" into a reminder with the text "Call Mom" that will fire next Tuesday at 5pm. Take a look at this to see other examples of input it will interpret, but please ignore the sucky POP-related code and just go with this simpler version if at all possible.

I've mentioned a few times how I'm a fan of Backpack, and I've started to use Highrise to track day-to-day work stuff. However, the tool that I'm excited about lately is Stikkit, which allows you to keep a digital collection of yellow sticky notes that have brains behind them.

The general idea with Stikkit is that you quickly jot down whatever you need to remember and the tool figures out if the note represents an appointment, to-do item, contact, bookmark, or some combination of those. Each note is just a wide open text area, like a real sticky note, and there's no structure imposed on your notes (e.g. title or description fields). This allows for a lot of flexibility, making it easy to store almost any kind of data, including:

• To-do items or lists of to-dos (small projects)
• Reference information, like names of restaurants to go to or bands to check out
• "Standard" contact information (personal address book)
• Events/appointments (with reminders)
• Bookmarks or URLs that go along with any of the above (it's nice to have them stored together)

The feature set is solid, and you can even use it to drive your GTD system. (If you do this, here's a quick tip: link stikkits together by including their aka names in curly braces.) But to me, the fun comes in when you use the super-complete, ultra-friendly API to slice and dice the data in your own way. They've made it easy to dump any kind of data you'd like into the app, and with the API it's also easy to access this data and use it however you like.

For example, there's currently no mobile version of Stikkit, and I want a way to access my data from my BlackBerry. With a tiny bit of fiddling and no code, I created an RSS feed of my to-do items using the API, which I then loaded into NewsGator Go!. It's not a perfect solution but it'll get me over the hump, and I may revisit the idea later and whip up a mobile version myself in Rails because the API is so robust.

In terms of downsides, I'd ding Stikkit on the following:

• No mobile version, at least not yet (mentioned above)
• Some bugs here and there
• Performance (i.e. speed) is so-so

I think all these issues will be rectified over time, because the team is building on top of Stikkit for their next app so it's not like it will become orphaned. Progress may not be moving as fast as we'd like, but it never does.

Overall, I'd say it's good, and if you want a flexible, easy way to store your personal information you should give it a try.