New version launched!
GoalsOnTrack’s new version has been officially launched today.
You should be able to login and use the site using your current login and password. All data you have entered in the old version persists in the new version, though the layout and look-and-feel are different now.
If you can’t login or access your data in the new version, please let me know immediately and I will make sure it’s fixed asap.
Please test around and give the new version a try. Let me know if you have found any bugs or have any suggestions.
Thanks and Happy New Year to You All!
Christmas release
It has been a bit quiet lately on the blog, that’s because I have been focusing on getting this new release done for the past few days. There’re just two days away from Christimas, and a new version is almost ready. Actually the backend is pretty much done already for the production. However, I am still working on several front end items, such as some new screenshots, testimonials etc.
Although I have been trying to test the code as thoroughly as possible, there still could be bugs or minor glitches here and there. I will probably have to deal with them after this release is in production.
Another thing is with the new feature of uploading pictures for goals. I will need to test it all out on a staging server first before the code goes live. If everything goes well, that shouldn’t take long, otherwise, there could be a slight delay. Anyway, I think the new version will probably be out around Christmas, and everyone should be able to see and use the new version before the new year.
A brief down time
There has been a brief down time, about 5-10 minutes, on the hosting server this morning. It happened around 6am. It seemed like some uninitialized object had caused mongrel processes to fail. But it has been corrected now.
For those of you who are interested in the backend setup, the site is running on a dedicated linux server, with Apache/2.2.9 as web server, and 2 mongrel clusters as app servers. The site itself is coded in Ruby on Rails, and the database is running on MySQL 5.
If you’re a web developer or techie person, you may want to check out my other blog at http://harryche2008.wordpress.com/ where I occasionally post RoR and web development related stuff.
New features in upcoming release
As I have mentioned in my previous posts, I have been working on a new version of the GoalsOnTrack.com for the past 3 months. Everything is coming along pretty well, and I am planning to launch the new site before Christmas. The original plan was to launch by the mid-December, but it seems that there are just so many things to complete and the launch date has to be pushed back.
Anyway here are some of the new features in the next release, and I hope you will like them.
- Schedule tasks on dashboard - Now it is very easy to schedule your daily to-do list items. All can be done via a context menu on the dashboard. You can quickly change the due date of a tasks on dashboard to today, tomorrow, or later.
- View which goal a task belongs to on dashboard - Every task on your todo list on dashboard view will display which goal it belongs to. You will quickly know what tasks need to be done for all your goals for the day.
- Put a goal on the backburner - For those goals you find yourself not really making much progress, now you can choose to put it on the backburner and it will not show up on your daily dashboard, so that you can focus more on those goals which are more important.
- Upload inspiring pictures for goals - Now you are able to upload your own pictures for goals. The system provides a few default pictures for different type of goals, but you can add your own now.
- Goal dashboard - For people who like to concentrate on one goal at a time, now you can use the “Goal Dashboard”, which is different from general dashboard in that it only shows tasks for that goal only.
- Reports on progress and timesheet - A new set of reports are now availabe in flash animations, including both goal progress report and time usage report pie charts.
There are some other small improvements or features added here and there which will be available in the new release. If you have any suggestions or ideas, please don’t hesitate to let me know.
Upcoming changes to GoalsOnTrack.com
It has been almost a month and a half since GoalsOnTrack website was launched. I have been working on a new version of the site, which includes a lot of improvements to the UI and some fixes to hidden bugs. I also have received quite some great feedback from GOT users(over 1000 at the time of writing), thank you for all your great advice. I will graduatelly implement all the best features that you wanted into the coming revisions.
Here I posted a sneak peak of what new version of GOT will look like, please let me know if you like it or not.
New UI for GOT
In addition to the changes to the site itself, I will also need to have the introductary pages re-designed as well. I will also try posting more in the blog. There seems to be a lot to do in the coming weeks. But it should be fun.
