Yesterday, I came across a cool rails project: Tracks and it got me very excited. I spent 30 minutes to install it, and started entering some data. And the best part, I already completed 2 actions!
Tracks is a web based application to help you in Getting Things DONE: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, a very effective method by David Allen. David’s approach is based on a few simple tenets: chanelling all inputs to as few buckets as possible, figuring out what the next action is for each project, deciding what to do next based on energy level, time available and priority… David developed this method based on his years as a consultant and anyone can approach it and implement it effectively with a little discipline.
Using Tracks can help you Get Things DONE! I had been trying to use BaseCamp so far, but I like Tracks approach better. With basecamp, I can’t figure out easily what to do next. Tracks presents you all the actions to be done on all projects sorted by due date.
Don’t get me wrong, BaseCamp is a very nice tool and comparing the 2 is not really fair for either. I had been trying to use basecamp to do what Tracks is designed to do.

The project is still a bit rough and I didn’t see much installation instructions, and it could be I didn’t look hard enough. I got the source code from the project subversion, and after after a few attempts, here’s what I did on Kubuntu 5.10.

svn co –username=guest http://www.rousette.org.uk/svn/tracks-repos/tags/tracks-1.041 tracks-local/

password is “guest”

create a database (tracks)

Create environment.rb and database.yml from the templates provided:

cp environment.rb.tmpl environment.rb
cp database.yml.tmpl database.yml

Edit database.yml (set correct user, password if you used tracks). I did not need to modify environment.rb.

Create a log directory

mkdir log

Remove the updates from 2adduser_id.rb

#    execute “UPDATE ‘contexts’ SET ‘user_id’ = 1;”
#    execute “UPDATE ‘projects’ SET ‘user_id’ = 1;”
#    execute “UPDATE ‘todos’ SET ‘user_id’ = 1;”

run:

rake migrate

check the path to ruby in script/server
And finally run:

script/server

Then first, create a user: http://localhost:3000/signup.
Then you can start using it: http://localhost:3000