The nice people at JumpBox have just released a JumpBox for Tracks 1.7. JumpBoxes are pre-built, pre-configured virtual applications which run in a range of Virtualization software applications. You just download the JumpBox (free), then open the file with your Virtualization software. Once the JumpBox has booted, it will give you a URL which you can visit in a browser. The software will then guide you through setting up an account. If you’d like to try out the JumpBox without installing it, you can use the “Trial This JumpBox” button on the web site, which will let you play around with it to test it out. It’s great to have another method of using Tracks for those of you who don’t want to go to the trouble of installing Tracks and its dependencies on your computer, or installing Tracks on a web host. Try it out! I’ll add links and instructions to the manual in due course.

...and a new home! I have now completed the migration to the new Shared Accelerator at Joyent.com, and in the process, gave Tracks its own domain name: getontracks.org. You may find that the new server feels a bit more snappy than the old one, and it should be more stable and reliable. The migration process was fairly complex, and it’s possible that some links may be broken, so do please email me if you find anything amiss. I’ve redirected the old domain to the new one, so feed readers should pick up the redirection. If they do not, you might want to enter the new feed URL manually for the RSS2 feed or Atom feed.

I was hoping to replace our Trac bug tracker with a custom solution run with ExpressionEngine (which runs this site), but importing existing tickets proved too much for my pre-Christmas brain! Instead, I imported all the old tickets into an Assembla space. Assembla offers a number of rather cool features, and will be easier for me to administer. You can find out how to use the site to submit tickets here.

I’m off to Brazil for a work course again on Monday, and I’ll be away for 3 weeks. I won’t have email or web access during that time, so can I ask that you direct any questions to the forum or mailing list where other Tracks users will be able to help you. If you want to make a pull request on GitHub, or if you’ve got a patch, lukemelia, lrbalt and epall all have commit rights to the main repository, so you can send your request to them.

Have a great summer everyone, and I’ll post again when I get back!

GitHub provides a handy shortcut for creating a Pledgie campaign, and shows the button on the repository page. We were previously accepting donations using a Paypal button, which meant I then had to do some mental arithmetic and manually update the MacBook-O-Meter to show the additional donations. Pledgie is much easier to use, so I’ve now embedded the Pledgie button on the Contribute page, and also in the sidebar of the site. Click the button if you feel like making a donation! Pledgie donations can be anonymous or you can display your name proudly in the donors list, and you can use PayPal or a credit card for payment.

Spanish-speaking Tracks users will be interested to know that BitNami have a couple of screencasts in Spanish, showing the installation process with BitNami (which was produced by Javier Martínez) and an introduction to using Tracks. Many thanks to Antonio Santos at BitNami for pointing me to the screencasts, and for telling me that Tracks was the third most downloaded Stack on BitNami last month!

I’m happy to say that Tracks has now moved to GitHub. The subversion repository is still available as a read-only repository, but all new development will happen via Git at GitHub. The main reason for this move is to make it much easier for people to contribute to the project. Anyone can clone the repository and submit patches, but to make life even easier, you can sign up for a free account at GitHub and then fork Tracks. GitHub provides a ‘pull request’ button, so when you’ve added something cool or fixed a bug, hit the button and we’ll pull in your changes. Git makes merging much easier than Subversion, even if the codebase has moved on a bit since you created the patch.

The latest stable version of Tracks can still be downloaded as a .zip file (see the download link in the sidebar). If you don’t want to install Git, but you are feeling adventurous and want to get the very latest development version, you can use the ‘Download’ button on the GitHub page to get a tarball of the project.

To clone Tracks, change to a directory in which you want to store Tracks (e.g. ~/Sites):

git clone git://github.com/bsag/tracks.git
cd tracks

If (when!) you produce a cool new feature or fix a bug, create a patch. If you develop in a branch called ‘experiment’:

git diff master..experiment > my_feature.patch 

Then attach my_feature.patch to a ticket.

Or you can sign up for a free account on github and fork Tracks using the convenient button. You can then use the button to issue a pull request for your changes to be pulled into the main repository.

I’ve been getting a fair bit of spam slipping through Akismet’s fingers recently, so I’ve decided to turn comment moderation on and see how it goes. Please feel free to comment as usual, but remember that your comment won’t show up immediately. If you are a spammer, your comment won’t turn up at all!

I’ve just uploaded an introductory screencast to the screenshots page. In it, I introduce the basics of starting with a new, blank installation of Tracks, adjusting the preferences, adding contexts, projects and actions, and editing actions. In due course, I’ll add more screencasts on specific aspects, like using tags, the tickler, and the statistics page.

It’s the first screencast I’ve done with a voiceover, so please forgive the stumbling, mumbling parts. Watching the screencast, you might marvel at the fact that I lecture for a living. The thing is, I’m used to a live audience (except at 9am Monday lectures, where the audience is mostly asleep), and talking to myself felt distinctly odd I also seemed to be channelling Bill Lumbergh from Office Space, with my “let’s go ahead and…”. I don’t know why, because I almost never say that in real life. Anyway, enjoy, and try not to laugh too hard.

Manuel Morales from BitNami emailed to tell me about the Tracks Stack they have developed. These are easy to install, multi-platform packages for installing various Open Source applications. You download a package which installs as a stand-alone stack of all of the components required to run the application. What this means is that if you want to run Tracks on Windows XP, Linux or Mac OS X, but you don’t really know where to start with installing Ruby, Rails and MySQL, you can just download the stack. It installs everything you need and even configures the application and the database for you. The Tracks Stack installs the brand spanking new Tracks version 1.5rc1.

So if you’re interested by Tracks but have been daunted by the installation procedure, give a Tracks Stack a whirl!

After a lot of soul-searching, I’ve set up a PayPal donate button for those of you who would like to make a donation to support Tracks. We have a goal in mind: buying a MacBook for each of the developers, so that we can properly test Tracks on the Mac, Windows and Linux, using Parallels Desktop. See the Contribute page for the full details, and thanks in advance to anyone who is kind enough to make a donation!

I’ve been playing around with Locomotive recently, and I’m really impressed how easy the whole process is now. I’ve altered the zip package of Tracks 1.043 to make it as easy as possible for MacOS X users. I’ve pre-configured the package to use the SQLite3 database, which is included in the package, and also set up the logs and environment.rb file so that all you need to do is download Locomotive, point it at your Tracks folder and go! The full instructions are in the tracks-1.043 folder in installation.html.

As a side effect, the process of installation should be a little easier for Windows and Linux users too, because you no longer need to do the tedious copying of the *.tmpl files and folders. I’ve also included a security patch (details here). If you’re using Tracks on a public server, I would install the new version, but if it’s on your own machine with no public access, you should be fine.

I’m going to radically overhaul both the installation method and instructions for the next release, because I know that people get put off by the installation process.

Update 2007-03-25: A few users bumped into a problem with using newer versions of the Locomotive bundles (see explanation here), so I’ve updated the tracks-1.043.zip package to fix the problem, and updated the installation.html to explain the importance of using the ‘Standard Rails March 2007’ bundle.

You might have noticed the new box at the top of the sidebar on the right. Joyent—the company that produces the Joyent Connector online team management software, TextDrive webhosting, Strongspace secure backup space and Bingo! online storage—is participating in an affiliate programme. It works like this: if you click the links to the right and subsequently sign up for any of the services, I will get 15% of the sale, which will go towards supporting Tracks development.

I’m usually very wary of advertising of any form, but in this case, I’m happy to do it. After all, I eat my own dog food! All of my sites are hosted by TextDrive, and I’ve been more than happy with the service. I also have a Strongspace account, which is incredibly useful.

So if you’re looking for hosting, online storage or backup or team management software, do give them a look, and perhaps we can all benefit!

I’m not sure how many Tracks users also read my blog, so I thought I’d explain my unscheduled period of inactivity here too. I had to go into hospital for an operation, and am now on sick leave from work for 6 weeks. At the moment, I’m still feeling very sore and tired, so it might be a while before I catch up on emails, forum postings and tickets. As ever, thanks to all those who held the fort in my absence (and sorry I couldn’t let you know in advance—it was all a bit sudden), particularly Luke, who has carried on producing some great fixes while I’ve been away.

Like last year, I’m going to Brazil to work for most of September, and I leave tomorrow. I won’t have any email or web access while I’m there, so I obviously won’t be responding to support requests. Until I get back, you could try posting any requests for help on the forum or the mailing list.

Have fun, and see you when I get back!

I’ve started a couple of pages on the wiki for recommended web hosts for Tracks (i.e. web hosts that enable you to install Tracks yourself on a public server), and also hosted Tracks installations, where all you have to do is sign up for an account.

If you have any links to add to either page, please do. You need to sign in using the same credentials as you use for the Tracks Forum. If you don’t want to sign up for the forum, just send me the details that you want added and I’ll do it.