GTD Tracks blog

Due to the increasingly degrading performance issues we are currently experiencing I have accelerated the search for a new hosting provider and have identified one. The signup process is underway and I hope to have the switch turned on to the new account by Friday night.

Please bear with us as we remedy this situation. As a daily user of Tracks myself I understand what an impedance this is to your productivity. For that I apologize.

I have really not been happy with the current performance we’re experiencing with GTDTracks. While it may seem like a cop-out, I believe this to be an issue with our hosting provider. We’ve had enough minor instabilities and unknown system hiccups with our current provider that I will be actively looking for a new hosting provider. Please hang in there while we remedy this situation, thank you for your patience.

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

I’ll be upgrading the load balancing solution tonight around 10:30 PM EST – though there should be no service interruption at all.

For the techies out there I’m changing to an Apache 2.2 proxy/proxy_cluster solution instead of using Pound as my load balancer. While we haven’t received any complaints, I just wasn’t pleased with the stability we’re seeing with our Pound solution.

I will also use this as an opportunity to put a system monitoring solution, monit, in place. I know some other Tracks hosting services have been experiencing excessive downtimes – it is our goal to be your stable Tracks provider.

I plan on taking the site down for a couple of minutes tonight, around 10:30 pm EST, to reconfigure our load balancer and improve system uptime.

We experienced some intermittent downtime between midnight last night and this morning. We’ve been having some issues with the quality of service our hosting service is providing and will be exploring various options shortly.

I’m going to try and take a look at our server setup this afternoon for the purpose of simplifying our setup – I don’t expect any downtime but be aware some fiddling may be happening…

We’ll let you know when we’re steady again.