Listhings blog

Check-check-checklists have arrived

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:53:00 +0300

For quite some time I’ve wondered why the heck didn’t I do this earlier. (Even the Listhings icon features a nice little checklist!)

Here they are. Checklists. Pick as many as you like. They come in all your favorite familiar colors. This is how they will look like:

You can create a checklist from the + button, then choosing “Checklist”.

You can fill the checklists with simply entering the list items one-by-one, pressing Enter for a new item. Arrow keys will also help you navigate and create new items to the lists (they work both ways - so up-arrow will let you add items to the top of your checklists.)

Plus, there’s now a new color for all the checklists and regular text notes available - brown.

Watch this space for some more news on improvements.

Post photos for free

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:30:00 +0200

Listhings has gone through a major upgrade just recently, and along with increased stability you can now post up to 20 photos for free to Listhings to your canvases.

Go try it out, it’s really easy.

Either simply drag and drop a photo from your local computer or from another website onto a Listhings canvas, and it will be sticked there and kept for as long as you would like it to be kept.
Or click the + button in the upper right corner of the canvas, and choose Picture from the dropdown menu.
3 MB max upload size per photo

Or go Pro!

If you want more than 20 photos, you now have the option to sign up for a Listhings Pro account which gives you as much as 5 GB of storage for photos (that’s enough for millions of medium-size photos). You can sign up either when you bump to the limit, or from your account preferences dialog. Here’s the nitty-gritty:

5 GB of storage for photos
12 MB max upload size per photo
$2.50 per month
Secure sign-up via PayPal
Pay with any major credit card (VISA, MasterCard, AmEx, etc)

Pretty soon, Listhings Pro users can access some cool extra features in addition to being able to upload more photos, so stay tuned and sign up if you’re interested.

As the Valentine’s Day is approaching, it’s a good time to jot down your wish-lists and ideas for presents with Listhings.

Important information regarding guest usage

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 20:58:38 +0300

Starting from October 10, 2011, Listhings application will no longer be available for guests (i.e. those using Listhings without a password). If you are using Listhings as a guest, you need to create yourself an account. Upon creating yourself an account, all your notes that you have stored on the Listhings page will be transferred to your newly created account.

It’s absolutely free. Besides, you will also have other benefits of being a registered user - such as accessing your notes from other computers (using your email and password to sign in) and multiple canvases.

So, if this concerns you, please sign up as registered user before October 10, 2011. It only takes 30 seconds.

The reason I am asking you to do this is that I am planning some great updates to Listhings - some which could not work with unauthorized users. Also, using Listhings without a password proved to be less secure than I realized.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to email me at martin@listhings.com.

Thanks!

Listhings on iPad

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:08:00 +0300

Yesterday Listhings switched servers. That went really well. Now I can share some more good news with you.

Listhings is now a bunch of steps more compatible with the iPad. You can pan around the canvases, drag notes around and edit them. While some details (resizing sticky notes horizontally, for example) do not work yet and there might be some small quirks here and there, the overall experience is now much, much smoother.

Oh, and did I mention that real-time sharing works across all platforms? That is, whenever someone updates notes on a canvas from a regular computer, all folks using iPads will see these changes instantly, in real-time, and vice versa.

How to use Listhings on iPad?

Simply open up your web browser
Navigate to Listhings.com
Click the arrow button next to address bar
Choose Add it Home Screen, like this:

Switching servers

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 23:23:46 +0300

Folks, I’ve finally got some good news for you on stability. I took some time and re-wrote some of the hazy parts of Listhings core code that dealt with real-time communication and sharing. I know, I know, I was super-excited too when I got it all running last year using a technology called APE. The thing is, time has moved on and newer, much more reliable technologies have surfaced. So, I re-engineered most of the hazy parts now to newer technologies, such as Socket.IO (and WebSockets, eventually, which will hopefully make its major come-back soon). But that’s just one part of the good news.

The other part is that we are currently switching our servers. This process should finish within the next few hours. You should not notice the transition in any way, actually. All your notes will be there and you should be able to log in again in a few hours time.

“What’s in it for me?” you might want to ask. What you will get out of this is more stable and reliable service that does not go down daily.

I hope I’ll have some more good news for you soon enough :) Stay tuned.

Hey, it's been months. What's up?

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:41:45 +0200

Indeed, it’s been a few months of silence from me here. Let me fix this right now.

So, what’s cooking?

First, Listhings now has over 10,000 users. It happened rather quietly just a few days ago and Listhings now indeed has over ten thousand registerd users. Many donations have been made to support the development as well and I’m very thankful to all those who have done so. Have you donated already?

And second, a new version is in the works. I’ve been tinkering around with different frameworks and APIs such as Recess, CodeIgniter, Kohana and others. (These are web application development frameworks, for those who don’t know). A few months ago I settled on a decent one to base the new version of Listhings on. The new version will include a bunch of new features (one which I can shout out right now is rich text editing but there’ll be a lot more) and improvements on the stability and overall look and feel. I am pretty confident the new version will be released still within this year, 2010.

Now, speaking of stability… some of you might have noticed the frequent 3-5 minute downtimes Listhings has from time to time. I am doing all I can to avoid these but I can’t promise there will be no more such short downtimes until the release of the next version. Starting from the next version, there should be no more such short outages as I am planning to deploy the application into different set-up. On the scale of percentages by the way, the uptime of Listhings services has been around 97% over the last few weeks. This should significantly increase after the next release.

You might also want to ask “Why are these downtimes happening?” Well, it appears even though I am renting a virtual private server for Listhings, I still have to deal with something the hosting provider calls “extensive use”. They seem to have a mechanism in place that blocks the entire site for a few minutes in case it thinks the traffic gets too high (even though I stay within the limits of the virtual server) It’s pretty sad, I know, and I’ve optimized the site every possible way to avoid such blocks. Eventually the new version will be deployed into a completely different server set-up so such errors should be gone for good after the release.

In this video, published a few weeks ago, Bob Gower from...

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 23:08:26 +0300

In this video, published a few weeks ago, Bob Gower from bobcanhelp.com shows how he uses Listhings. Bob Gower is a guy who works with managers and executives at medium-sized software companies to recude their problems delivering software predictably on tight time-lines.

I’m experimenting with note titles at Listhings. I often...

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 13:44:00 +0300

I’m experimenting with note titles at Listhings. I often use Listhings to store recipes I like. It’s almost always the case where your notes end up with a title on the first line, followed by some content. This is especially the case with recipes. I’ve now tuned Listhings to highlight the first line on notes if the note has more than one line of content. I think it makes sense and provides a good visual way to find what you’re looking for.

What do you think?

You can now share canvases with multiple people more easily. You...

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 12:40:00 +0300

You can now share canvases with multiple people more easily. You can add multiple email addresses for sharing, separated with a… guess what? commas or semicolons!

Start sharing

Lost your password?

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 12:06:00 +0300

Just launched the new password reminder tool at Listhings. It uses true random passwords generated by atmospheric noise, with a help of a service called passwd.me.

So in case your password at Listhings is forgotten, come ask for a new one - we’ll literally give you a new password from the skies :)

A very nice Spanish video tutorial on how to use Listhings. (Muy...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 08:42:40 +0200

A very nice Spanish video tutorial on how to use Listhings. (Muy buen tutorial video en español sobre cómo utilizar Listhings.)

A complete re-install of web server

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:42:00 +0200

I was wrong about the end of nightly downtimes, and I’m sorry. In fact, the situation got somewhat worse tonight. At around 3 AM (GMT time), the web server log script failed to start up the proxy web server - the same error that had been haunting me previously as well. I was able to get the server back up and running around 6 AM (GMT time).

Obviously I had had enough of these errors already. Thus I decided to take down the whole main web server for a complete re-install to get rid of these errors once and for all. It took me and DreamHost (they were a huge help for me, thanks folks!) a little over an hour to get it back up and running. The server is now lean and clean, running in a complete fresh environment.

All Listhings services are now operating normally, and I will be keeping a very close eye on the web server during the next days to make sure nothing like this would occur again!

Update: even though there have been downtimes, I would like to point out that these downtimes did not pose any risk whatsoever to your notes at Listhings. All your data is safe, and backed up.

Listhings

Sharing and real-time updates make Listhings ideal for virtual SCRUM board

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:46:00 +0200

First, a little note on how Listhings is doing. Listhings has been steadily growing and I’m glad to share with you that Listhings has around 4,000 registered users now, and around 40% of them are active users. At peak hours, there are around 130 people simultaneously logged in to Listhings. You can check this number at any time from the About screen at Listhings.

But what also makes me really happy are the numbers I see on the server usage statistics. Ever since I changed the main web server software at Listhings from the well-known Apache to a little less known Lighttpd back in January, the server memory usage has stayed on the same level no matter how many users are logged in simultaneously. This change also lowered the web server’s energy consumption.

Now, let me introduce sharing. Ever since I created the first version of Listhings back in April 2009, I’ve wanted to do this. Today I’m thrilled to introduce you a totally new version of Listhings which lets you share notes with unlimited amount of people, and interact with each other’s notes in real-time. This new version is already up and running so you can go check it out.

Here are just a few examples how sharing notes is good for you:

Generate ideas with a team - share the canvas and have all your team members write down their ideas and notes about a new project. Then organize the notes visually, group them together and start working.
Do teamwork – create a canvas with notes for each of your team members, then share the canvas with them all and write down tasks for each person so you can all see who’s doing what. It’s a really easy way to get organized really fast.
Use it as SCRUM-board – you can share a canvas with your dev team members and use it as a SCRUM-board. Real-time updates across people help you stay organized and you’ll be saving some paper.

Let me share some of the technical nitty-gritty behind it. You might not even notice the difference between the “old” and the new version of Listhings because almost the only diffference you see is one button - it’s the “Share” button. You’ll find it in the upper right corner of your canvases after you log in.

But even though the changes you see visually are not big, I’ve done tremendous amount of work in the back-end. Because what sharing really means is not just the ability to send off email invites to people but the ability to interact with each-other’s notes in real-time. Yes, real-time. As you change something on your shared canvas, all other people will see it in real-time. As anyone else changes anything on the same canvas, you’ll see it. Instantly.

The real-time updates are possible thanks to a server software called APE (yeah, the monkey!). APE is a new piece of technology that was rolled out in just December 2009. I was a fan of APE since the first week and knew exactly that’s going to enable me to do what I’ve long wanted to with Listhings.

So, a little bit about APE. APE stands for AJAX Push Engine. It’s a super lightweight server with Javascript extensions, and a Javascript client. For Listhings, I had to customize the server and figure out authorization because APE is originally designed somewhat similar to an IRC chat server, except without any basic authorization built in.

So this is how it works – every canvas on Listhings has its own APE channel. Once you interact with notes on a shared canvas, the updates you made are broadcasted to the corresponding APE channel, and pushed instantly to all other people viewing that canvas. That’s pretty similar to what Google Docs does.

If you want to take it for a real spin, invite a few friends over to any of your (less private) canvases, and wait for them to join you. Once you then start playing with the notes - changing colour, resizing and re-positioning them, your friends will also see it. Once they do something, you’ll see it.

Of course, I will be adding some nifties like the list of people who are currently logged in to the canvas you are also viewing, etc.

Aha! And I’ve also managed to make links clickable in notes. So once you type in a website link, it will become clickable.

So that’s it for now. Go enjoy sharing notes on Listhings!

No more nightly downtimes!

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:04:47 +0200

After some drilling and digging, I can say the nightly downtimes that sometimes occured from 3 AM to 6 AM GMT are now history. I found that the downtimes were caused by a script that rotates server logs. Oddly that script didn’t always succeed and what I ended up was a proxy server not running. Now there’s the importance of a thing called proxy server!

Hello world

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:23:00 +0200

Hi. I’m Martin Tajur (@tajur) and I build Listhings as a hobby project. Here I am posting updates about Listhings service status, and will also write about how certain things are built at Listhings.