Mastodon wishes: topic tags that actually work

The mastodon social network (I'm https://appdot.net/@jgordon) lets me follow people at any Mastodon community (instance). Mastodon is person-centric. Reddit, by contrast, lets me follow activity on predefined topics.

I'd like Mastodon to have better topic support; I'd like to be able to follow both people AND topics.

In theory Mastodon has support for topics through hash tags. In practice, particularly if you are on a smaller Mastodon instance, the tags are not very useful. They only "know" about posts that have been pulled into a user's home instance, most often because someone on the instance follows the post author.

I'd like to see "topic tags" that were predetermined and worked across the Mastodon part of the Fediverse. I imagine a registry of topic tags that's updated by an instance daily based on instance posts using the topic tag. There are likely better models for how to do this.

Trello teams explained: it's worse than you can imagine (in free version)

I went through all of Trello’s (weak) online documentation trying to figure out how to manage my (free) Trello teams. Where in the UI is the a list of teams? I could see how to create a team. I could see how to add someone to a team. But where’s the team list?!?!

Turns out in free Trello “Teams” are not teams (of people). That’s why I couldn’t find them anywhere:

A “Team” is a collection of boards and people are part of boards and teams and people are related by … I think a Team is basically part of the natural key for a join table between boards and people and “teams”. (But a board can belong to only one Team (or NULL team) … so maybe Team is a foreign key in Board)

You see teams in the Boards screen; in this (hidden) UI they group boards. To add a board to a team you work from the board menu. But Trello has (inadvertently?) made it hard to find the full Boards screen. I don’t think there’s any link to it in the UI, you have to click on “Trello” or just go to URL trello.com.

So you’ve found the list of Boards. They are grouped by Starred Boards, My Boards and by “Team Names”. The Team Names have Boards, Members, Settings. All 3 of these buttons go to the same tabbed screen.

(Tip: The Team-Member collection shows in the URL. So if you know team name, just do http://trello.com/myteamname]

Click on any and you see the the UI equivalent of a join table made up of members, boards, and the “Grouping” (team). BoardGrouping:settings:settings lets you delete a team.

From this tabbed screen you edit the Members:Board relationships. You can delete a Team (remove all rows with same Team name). You can add Members (add rows to join table) by clicking on “Add by Email” which doesn’t actually add by Email, it just lets you search the global Trello user domain by email or Trello ID (should be called “Add Members”).  HOWEVER, to add a board to a team you go to the Board’s settings and use Change Team (this doesn’t remove members, just divides them into Team and Non-Team members). My head hurts. You figure out the rest.

Let me repeat that. In (free) Trello, the “Team” page is the SETTINGS for the grouped boards and it can only be found by going to the semi-hidden “trello.com” home page or the secret URL shortcut.

Teams may make more sense in the paid version but they’re a hot mess in the free version.

I think Trello is one of those great ideas that’s been broken. It’s rare for software to recover from a state like this.

Group text on iOS: native functionality and the Contaqs.app alternative (and GroupMe)

Our school mountain biking team has been doing group texting for coaches. Works well on rides — especially when coordinating riders of different skills. 

Yeah, I know the larvae do this. They use dedicated chat apps though, like WhatsApp Group Chat or Facebook Messenger or, much less often, named iMessage groups. We are old and set in our ways, so we need something that works with SMS. (Google Hangouts is said to support Group SMS, with Hangout 4.0, but I couldn’t verify this. Too complex anyway.)

The simplest approach to to send one message to a group, then dig up the thread when desired. You can even name the thread — but only if everybody is using iMessage (never happens). In practice many of us lose the thread.

There’s another approach sort of built into iOS. In OS X or iCloud you can define “Groups” of your Contacts. Bizarrely, you can see Groups using iOS Contacts.app, but you can’t edit Group membership in the standard iOS Contacts.app [1]. You can buy Contaqs.app for $2 and it will do lots of things that Contacts.app should do including editing Groups — and it works with the Contacts database. Or you can use iCloud or OS X to edit Groups and sync.

However you do it, once you define a group you can use it in iMessage as though it were someone’s name. There’s a limit of 10 SMS members however. Worse, a single person can have multiple phone numbers — and every number is used.So this looks appealing but it doesn’t actually work very well. What might work natively, at least for 10 or less SMS names, would be to create a Group composed of 1-n people each with 6-7 numbers each. Say the group is BIKE, and there are five people in it - Mike, John, Bob, Alice, Jim. Define the group BIKE, then create a contact MIkeJohnBob and a contact AliceJim with appropriate numbers. You’ll probably still hit the limit of 10 SMS numbers though.

But it’s not hopeless. It turns out Contaqs.app is pretty smart about this. When I chose my group in Contaqs.app, and select all the members (one tap) then tap SMS, it asks me to adjust the phone numbers for each recipient — and it does intelligent number selection. I was able to create a message for the BIKE group with 11 members, presumably because several used iMessage instead of plain old SMS.

i was able to create it … but not to send it. The message failed; I assume Contaqs.app can’t get around the 10 SMS limit (maybe is US specific?).

We should really use a group chat app that works on Android and iOS, like WhatsApp...

[1] A function we’ve been asking for since iOS 2. I don’t think we’ll every see it.

Update: Richard (in comments) suggested I look at GroupMe, a product launched in 2010 and acquired by Microsoft’s Skype in 2011. He says GroupMe will incorporate SMS users into a group, no app required. That wasn’t obvious from the main page, but in the About page … "Best of all, it works on nearly every phone, via push or SMS” and in support: "You don't need to have our app to use GroupMe. Add anyone from your phone book and they will immediately be able to chat with the group. You can chat with your groups directly over SMS.” SMS costs money, so I wonder if the web site has been revised to downplay the SMS integration. No business model needed since this is Microsoft.

It feels like the echo of another era, back when some phones walked on 2 legs and others slithered. You can do most things just with SMS (I have vague memories of Twitter and perhaps Facebook doing SMS things), and your correspondents don’t have to register or sign up for the app (yeah, you can spam anyone). A 2011 Business Insider article mentioned it alongside Kik; apparently GroupMe was hot once.

Every member of a GroupMe Group sees messages coming from a unique phone number. Which is a clever workaround for the limitations of SMS chat — the phone number you see is a unique identifier (key) for a combination of a Group ID and a member’s cellphone number. When you send a message to that number GroupMe confirms the sending phone (callerid) matches the database record, then GroupMe sends it out to all the other cell number that are a part of the group.

It’s clever, albeit a bit obsolete now, but it’s also quite an expensive approach. GroupMe must have ways to reclaim numbers for reuse ...

Trello - an orientation review

[This post was first written in 2013 and then revised in April 2016.]

When Emily said she was interested in Trello, on a day when I was at home tending to a recovering child, I leapt at it. She's done a fantastic job with Google Calendar, but she'd never found a task/project app she liked. Indeed, she has a bit of an allergy to them. Trello, it turns out, has a certain arts and crafts following.

That's a bit surprising, as I know Trello as a corporate-focused project and work management tool from Joel Spolsky's geek-loved Fog Creek software. It never occurred to me that Emily might like it.

I've used a number of Task and Project tools myself; particularly a combination of Appigo's ToDo.app and the weirdly named ToodleDo web service [1], but Trello is a bit of an odd duck. So I put together these quick notes for myself - it's a geeky introduction to Trello.

Service properties and revenue model

Trello uses a freemium web model with Android and iOS apps. It is easy to cancel the service and it passed Gordon's Laws for Software and Service Acquisition. You can use Google authorization or a local account. Google access requests are Contacts only - which is plausible.

Revenue comes from corporate sales, corporate buyers pay $200/year for  admin tools, access restrictions, bulk JSON export, Google Apps org directory integration. Non-paying customers presumably encourage corporate adoption. They've added a $5/month option for "stickers" -- if they made this $20/year I'd pay just to support them. I worry about their revenue and longevity.

How Trello is put together

Cards are the equivalent of Tasks in Toodledo or ToDo.app and they are the essence of Trello. Not all of Trellow web features are available on the iOS app, but most are. Here's how Trello works:

• Organization: A collection of Members and of Boards. Organizations are optional, you can ignore this.
• Board: A named collection of Lists. Boards do not have dates but they are a good match for Projects especially if there's a collaborator. You need at least one Board.
• type: individual or organization
• membership (for org)
• visibility: public/private for individual, for org is member only/org wide
• List: A ranked collection of Cards. Lists do NOT have dates. You can move cards between lists. A typical use of a List is state tracking - To Do, Doing, Done. Can also use a List to hold notes, ideas, etc (but I'd use Simplenote for that).
• Card: A task or, if you prefer, a lightweight project. Has a Name, a single Due Date/Time, Assigned person and... 
• Description
• Label - color icon (example, priority)
• Checklists  - these items don’t have a due date or a responsible person.
• Attachments - photo/video on iOS, on web can be Google Drive, Dropbox, Computer
• Subscribe option
• Comments (@ for autocomplete members)
• Activity record (read only)
• Links (can reference a card)
• Card’s don’t have a done or completed attribute. That’s a problem (see below).

Lists, Cards and Boards can be copied, so you can set them up as a template. Lists enable bulk operations on cards such as archive all and move all. Cards and Lists can be moved within the hierarchy.

Trello has "Power-Ups" that do things like Display Cards in Calendar format. The Calendar works well and it allows drag and drop between dates. The Calendar is supposed to have a feed that can be subscribed to from Google Calendar, but it didn’t work when I tried it. [Update 2016.04: The Calendar feed works well now, I use it to integrate project work into Google Calendar.]

Comparison of Trello to a traditional Task app:

ToDo.app/Toodledo	Trello
List/Project	Board
Completed (Yes/No)	List (state)
Task	Card (but no done status [2])

Keyboard Shortcuts

• D: card date picker
• L#: Card Label (ex: urgent, etc)

Teams and Boards

If you’re using free Trello then you want to have a single Trello account for each Person — Trello.app for iOS doesn’t support identity switching. A Person (Trello account/profile) can be a member of multiple Teams. Each team can have multiple Boards, but a Board has only one Team. A single Trello account (Person) can be associated with multiple Google IDs.

So the relationship between a Person and a Board is controlled by their Team membership. In Trello web or iOS one changes Teams to see Boards that are Team specific. (This is more clear in the app than in the web version.)

Example of Trello Lists to organize Cards

These Lists resemble states in ToodleDo. I'd personally use Labels to indicate importance rather than create a List and the use of lists to reflect a schedule seems odd...

• The Naive Optimist • 7 Do's and Don'ts for Founders - Lists include (Public Board Example)
• Big Picture
• Inbox
• This Week
• Later
• Today
• Done (archive this list daily)
• The Key Habits of Organization : zenhabits
• Most Important
• Today
• Incoming
• This Week
• Later
• Done
• Waiting On

It's interesting that these two are using Lists to organize by Time instead of moving Cards around the Calendar or assigning Dates. Their organization can be summarized as:

• Inbox: Cards that are new, not yet sorted
• Scheduled/Active: Today, This Week, Later
• Blocked/Waiting
• Done (which is archived)

I’ve done Trello with a list for an Agile backlog and a list for each iteration of a release. I’ve also implemented it with a backlog, an active list and a ‘done’ list.

 

The one big problem with Trello - no Done status

I like products that strongly represent a coherent philosophy of a willful developer. The downside of these products is said dev can dig their heels in and stick with a dumb decision. That’s how I account for absence of a “Done” status for Cards.

 

Instead of “Done” you are supposed to Archive the card. That would be ok if the Archive were a special list in which Due Dates didn’t make Cards turn radioactive, but the Archive UI is buried away. You can’t see the course of a project if you use Archive. (See workarounds.)

 

If you don’t use Archive you can use “Done” list to hold completed Cards. Or you can keep them in place and use a Label or other attribute to indicate Done; but if you don’t remove the Due Date the Card will become radioactive when it’s post-due.

 

A lesser problem with Trello - no local backup, no export

At least in the free version you can’t create a local XML backup of a Board, and you can’t create any local archive store representing project history.

 

Impression

 

Emily has used Trello as a basic task manager. In April 2016 I started using it for my work and personal projects and I rewrote this review. I’m not satisfied with any project management tool I’ve seen, but Trello is my choice at this time. 

 

Trello is far less complex/powerful that RallyDev’s Rally project management tool. That’s not all bad though — Rally got very complex and hard to use over the years. Trello is a better tool for personal and small team projects. It doesn’t support assigning Card Checklist Items to individual persons, but that’s not a big issue. The user name can always be added to the checklist item.

 

I’d like to see an improved version of Trello that would be less costly than the business version. That version should fix the weird lack of a “Done” behavior and it should allow one to backup Boards locally and export a PDF archival record of Board content.

 

- fn -

[1] Nobody would combine those two — that was a historic accident. I later moved entirely to Appigo ToDo Cloud.app. ToDo Cloud has project management features that are almost good enough, but I ultimately decided to keep those for smaller mini-projects and use Trello instead. Appigo has a similar problem with archived/old tasks and longitudinal project records.

App.net: Supporting account substreams with PourOver

[This one's for @duerig.]

The earliest mention of "channels" in my web archives dates to 1996 [1]. There's not much more than a word about them, but I remember what I was thinking. There were a lot of things I wanted to share [2], but I didn't enjoy harming unwilling bystanders. I wanted broadcast channels (now we call them streams) that could be carved from my global shares [3].

The problem, of course, is that my interests are probably not your interests. Emily is my most faithful reader, but she skips my tech shares. On app.net some like my diverse shares, but others favor dialog and social chat. Political opinions? Religion? Right. Limited scope.

So, in the interests of minimizing collateral damage, like a political post appearing in a stream of iOS comments, I'd like an easy way to do streams off my shares.

Happily Pinboard, which I use as a micro-blogging platform publishing to @johngordon  (PourOver) and kateva.org/sh (IFTTT), supports those kinds of streams. Every tag has a feed, and when posting to Pinboard I can enter single character tags corresponding to streams. It's not the most elegant UI, but it works.

At the moment though all of my shares stream into one app.net channel (mixing metaphors there, but it kind of works). If my app.net account supported sub-channels/streams (I know that work is in progress, might be done) it seems like either PourOver and/or Pinboard stream-feeds would be a good step towards reducing drive-by share damage.

Update: app.net thread. Hope to see these pieces come together over the next few months.

- fn-

[1] My web "posts" from the early 90s are now embarrassing. The web was new then, even Alta Vista was years away. There was so much I couldn't imagine. More subtly, we live in the Randall Munroe web now. I know there are minds at play far beyond my own meager insights.
[2] Sharebot I am.
[3] In those days Global Shares were static web pages. I tried to generate things that were a cross between blog posts and Simplenote entries via FileMaker web page generation.

See also

• Filtering my Google Reader Share with Yahoo Pipes 9/2008 - That was my most serious streaming effort, not coincidentally around election time.
• Gordon's Tech: App.net - using Duerig's custom RSS feed to see only root posts from selected people
• Tweeting Google Reader Shares and Notes via feedburner 2010 - Google Reader shares had channel-like options
• Google reader shared items to Facebook 2009 - another example of trying to stream

Replacing Google Reader Share: Options emerge with Buffer, App.net, IFTTT and others

On the Day of the Dapocalypse Google ended Google Reader Share, though my old shares are still accessible almost a year later.

Google left a hole in the net that hasn't been filled yet (alas, hivemined).

Something's emerging to fill that space. It's not Google Reader Share; but you can still see the shape emerging.

Today I'm using Pinboard, alpha.app.net, IFTTT and buffer.

IFTTT is the glue that ties things together. Buffer and Pinboard are the note capture mechanisms. Buffer has more style, but Pinboard has the essential structure (title, link, comment) and it's willing to accept cash. App.net is the wild card; a rapidly evolving set of services that may be the foundation for future solutions (see app.net #googlereadershare)

I still miss GoogleReaderShare, but I'm curious to see what will come next.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: How to replace Google Reader: 11/2011 - the 7 core components
• A Parallel Universe In Which Google+ Enhances Google Reader 10/2011 - what could have been. Nice guide for a future replacement.
• Gordon's Tech: Twitter to WordPress via ifttt - limitations: 12/11 - tweets don't have enough structure
• Gordon's Tech: Posterous - a Google Reader social replacement? (nope. Later they were acquired by Twitter)
• Gordon's Tech: After the fall of Google Reader: Posterous, Tumblr and Zootool with Twitter on the side 11/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Microblogging and Google Reader: Tumblr Fails 11/2011

Wiki impressions: XWiki

After a disastrous SharePoint 2007 to 2010 migration [1] it was clearly time to replace my team's use of SharePoint wiki. The mangled conversion was a red-flag-and-air-raid-siren declaration that SP was going to be a longtime world of hurt.

We looked around at the wiki options, and considered TWiki, XWiki and Confluence (WikiMatrix). Atlassican Confluence is the best of breed, but for corporate users like us it's expensive. Hardware we have, platform licenses we have, networks and backups we have, and expertise we have. What we don't have is a budget.

TWiki is the easiest of the three to configure and it has the fewest technical requirements. XWiki looked like more work, but we liked the rich text editor and (limited) table support. We're now starting up on XWiki enterprise. Here are a few impressions from the process that may be of interest to other wiki searchers ...

• We started out on a Linux server but couldn't get XWiki working. We're not Linux experts. We switched to Windows and our engineer resource had XWiki setup within a day. I wasn't impressed with the ease of installation.
• XWiki requires a Java Servlet Container. That rules out Dreamhost and many other hosting options. (TWiki can install with Dreamhost.)
• XWiki includes a blog service but there's no support for Blogging APIs. So you can't use MarsEdit or Windows LiveWriter to write.
• The documentation is weak. For example, how do you delete a Space? Turns out it's easy if you have privileges, but the documentation claimed we needed an extension.
• XWiki Enterprise is a geek platform, though much of the complexity can be hidden.
• I like the approach to URLs and page titles. You can change a page title, but the page URL is fixed. XWiki provides an effective UI for looking up local pages during link creation. (SocialText retitling creates a redirect page with the old title/url and a link to the new title/url. Sharepoint changes the URL and title, but updates intra-liki links. Foreign links break.)
• The rich text editor is simple but works fine for my purposes.
• IE 9 doesn't work with the controls on gadgets, but seems ok for non-admin users.
• XWiki has the universal wiki curse -- no ability to migrate posts between systems. I wonder if people who complain about being unable to move their medical records between providers see the similarity. OTOH, when our Linux install failed it was easy to move to Windows.

I'm reasonably optimistic that XWiki will work for us. I'm glad to be free of Sharepoint 2010.

See also:

• XWiki - Open source, LGPL, WYSIWYG
• Offline Browsers (web robot) – options to review
• How can I create a local copy of a Sharepoint wiki?
• A workaround for image uploading to Microsoft’s Sharepoint Wiki.

[1] With SharePoint it's not possible to separate software issues from implementation. Maybe Microsoft provides wiki conversion tools that our IT department didn't use. I have discovered that if I copy/paste of our 500+ SP 2007 wiki created pages into Word, then remove all styles, then past back into SP 2010, I can edit them again.

Sharing and annotation: Instapaper's supporting apps

I haven't found a replacement for the rough annotation-share-feed ecosystem that had grown up around Google Reader Social (RIP). I've given up, for example, on using Twitter as a Reader Social replacement.

Yes, I miss Google 1.0. I even miss Microsoft these days.

So I'm continuing to explore the pieces of the post-Google world; trying to see where this micro-market may go. This is poorly tracked territory, but today I came across an unexpected guide in the Instapaper: Supporting iPhone and iPad Apps page.

Instapaper has an ecosystem, and although it doesn't have a feed, it will post to Tumblr, Twitter and Pinboard. Tumblr has a feed (barely), Twitter can be turned into a feed (awkwardly) and Pinboard has a feed (and, mercifully, it's not free).

So what can I do with these pieces? Can I archive the output of Pinboard as WordPress posts?

I'll find out.

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: Pinboard imports Google Reader JSON exports

Update

• I tried Instapaper's bookmarklet, but it hangs in Chrome with a "saving" status in the tab.

Recovering Shared Reader items: JSON import into Wordpress

Google amputated a portion of my distributed memory, but they left me a frozen json remnant.

(Yes, we are living in a cyberpunk novel. Sigh.)

Across the net there are unanswered questions about what to do with these json archives. Google has been silent. I believe the Google humans who might help are ashamed or demoralized or fearful. Google 2.0 is not a happy place for them.

I want to represent my JSON archives as posts in a WordPress blog, perhaps with some kind of synthetic title. Then they will be available to search and link. Eventually I hope to add new annotations and shares to that archive, though there will be a gap of several months that will be difficult to fill.

This feels doable, but so far Google (the search engine) hasn't told me how. This is what I have found so far. When I do find an answer, I'm going to answer some of the dangling questions across the net ...

• Dariel: wrote a Python script to import shares into ReadItLater
• What are the good ways to import Google Reader Notes (.json) to Evernote? - Quora - an unanswered question
• battis.net » Transmogrifying those Google Reader JSON dumps into something useful - Seth Battis wrote a "PHP script that converts (at least my) Google Reader JSON dump into an XML file that WordPress can import as a list of posts. With the tags and annotations converted over. In fact, with all of the data in the JSON dump embedded in the XML file (although WordPress doesn’t read all of it)."
• Importing .json archives (Wordpress) - Stack Overflow - an unanswered question
• osx - Json viewer for mac - Super User: a way to at least view JSON documents.
• How can I Import Google Reader JSON archives into WordPress - Super User: I ask on SuperUser
• A public question I asked on Google+: I ask on G+

I'll update this post as I learn more. Seth's contribution suggests a fix is close; he needs to tweak some of his code.

Update 12/25/2011: Seth writes that he won't have time to work on this further but he recommends downloading his php file from his linked zip. I'll have to learn how to run PHP scripts from my Dreamhost account, but I don't think that's too hard.

Update 5/3/2012: Coping With Google Reader Changes | Much Ado About IT - accessing the lost items.

Tumblr - a Google Reader social replacement?

I liked many things about Posterous. Alas, it doesn't seem to have a revenue stream. Recently, in a desperation move, they tried to become more like G+ -- they even dropped post tags!

I also didn't care for the Posterous bookmarklet -- it pulled in too much of the source material.

Today I'm visiting Tumblr. It and Twitter seem to be the new homes for many of the Google Reader Social Diaspora. For example, both Twitter and Tumblr are on Feedly's one click share panel, but Posterous is an extra click away. That extra click kills. (Unsurprisingly the new Google Reader really only supports G+ well.)

Tumblr has the usual rich text edit options, but for microblogging I don't care too much about that. The bookmarket is impressive; better suited to microblogging than Posterous. The work of creating a Tumblr post from Feedly is very similar to creating a Google Reader Note/Share in the old Google Reader.

Tumblr will create tweets for each post and they do provide a (proprietary) backup. However there's no secondary posting; one of Posterous' best features is that they'll create a replica post on Blogger and WordPress. I've seen mention of ways to repost into wordpress from an RSS stream, or import a Tumblr export file into WordPress, but nothing that looks rock solid.

I like Tumblr, but I don't like the absence of an exit strategy.

Still, it's ahead of Posterous - particularly because of the Feedly support (wish Reeder supported Tumblr!).

XWiki - Open source, LGPL, WYSIWYG

A colleague pointed me to XWIKI. I really want to know how I missed this, version 1 was 2008 but it has roots back to 2003. I've been looking for an open source wiki with rich text editing. In some ways it's the OpenOffice replacement for Sharepoint.

It's LGPL, and sold into the enterprise. Good wikipedia discussion.