Tip: Offline Tracks Access & Actions on your Desktop 11

Posted by Ryan Thu, 09 Nov 2006 02:05:00 GMT

Tracks is great, we all know that (that’s why you’re here, right?) But every once and awhile my internet is down, or I’m just plain offline. However, it’s still good to have access to your action items at your fingertips. Here’s a little tip to get your Tracks actions into a text file on your computer for offline consumption.

As was mentioned in the creating a Track’s today view tip you can get a text feed of your actions by

  1. Go the the feeds page of your GTDTracks
  2. Clicking on the TXT icon next to the list of actions you want to retrieve.

If you copy the URL of the text feed page it will look something like:

http://gtdtracks.com/feed/text/username/longtoken_as92as

The easiest way to get that text file onto your computer is to use a command line tool like wget to download this file every hour onto your computer:

wget http://gtdtracks.com/feed/text/username/longtoken_as92as

And for extra credit, if you’re on Mac OS X, you can use geektool to have the text version of your actions displayed on your desktop with the curl command:

curl http://gtdtracks.com/feed/text/username/longtoken_as92as

And if you’re on windows you can use this tip from lifehacker to do the same thing

Tip: Creating a "Due Today" Action View 3

Posted by Ryan Mon, 31 Jul 2006 18:57:00 GMT

It is quite useful to have a “Due Today” view of your actions, regardless of context or project. While Tracks does not yet support such a condensed view (the default home page does list your actions sorted by due date – but that leaves a lot of extra noise in actions that are due tomorrow, next year etc…), you can get a nice “Due Today” view by doing the following:

  1. Go the the feeds page of your GTDTracks
  2. Click on the TXT icon next to “Actions due today or earlier”
And voi-la – you have a basic but very functional view of everything due today. I use this almost exclusively to quickly see what needs to be addressed today. 
AT PHONE:
    [Due: Jul-31-06] Phone home (Personal)

AT COMPUTER:
    [Due: Jul-31-06] Merge latest Tracks (GTDTracks)

AT HOME:
    [Due: Jul-31-06] Mow lawn (Lawn & Garden)

...

You can also make your view look one, two, three… days out by adjusting the http://gtdtracks.com/feed/text/...?due=0 parameter to be due=1 for today and tomorrow’s actions, or due=2 for the next 2 days etc…

Keep in mind that everytime you change any of your preferences the URL to your feeds will change.