4 ms·

Show HN: Littlelogs, a social journal of progress on your projects

43 points by joshsharp 11y ago

fallenhitokiri 11y ago
Congratulations for launching! What is / will be the difference between Littlelogs and Twitter e.x.? What wil make it special? I currently cannot check it out myself, I'm on the waiting list and don't have access yet, but from what I see it looks like no character limit? Will there be an API to pull down the updates and include them somewhere else, like on the project homepage? small bug report: I tried signing up with this description "im currently working on a self hosted CI server (leeroyCI) and a static site generated which will soon get a hosted web interface to make it comfortable." And I got s 500 error page. Replacing the description with "-" worked and let me sign up.
- joshsharp 11y ago
  Argh sorry. I've emailed you an invite instead.
stevenrossuk 11y ago
500 Server Error when I submitted my application, replaced description with "-" as fallenhitokiri mentioned.
- joshsharp 11y ago
  Should be fixed now, but I've emailed you an invite in the meantime. Sorry!
danschuller 11y ago
This is a neat. I like the idea and implementation! Reminds me a little of the .plan files from the old Quake days, mixed with twitter / social media. http://floodyberry.com/carmack/plan.html http://floodyberry.com/carmack/plan.html I've signed up. Here's my little log: http://littlelogs.co/rpgdan/ http://littlelogs.co/rpgdan/
- WorldMaker 11y ago
  For a brief period I had a server that polled Twitter and updated a .plan file from my tweets, simply because I could, but that was two or three Twitter API versions ago and I've also been using fewer and fewer unix boxen since then. Part of me wants to revisit the concept and run a Twitter over QOTD (port 17) server.
vinodkd 11y ago
I've been keeping journals for all my personal projects for quite some time now because I find it useful to "get context" when I go back to a particular project after some time. So something like this certainly piques my interest. My journal is usually a journal.md at the root of the project, like so: [1]. It has a very simple format: datetime stamp, text. Sometimes I use bullets and indented text, but its usually prose or code. Do you want to consider pulling journal updates directly from people's github as a feature? Of course, my kind of journal is a little too detailed - intended for me to pick up when I get back, but maybe a publicjournal.md which would be the author's ready-for-public-consumption version of the journal? [1]https://github.com/vinodkd/halo/blob/master/journal.md https://github.com/vinodkd/halo/blob/master/journal.md
- goldfeld 11y ago
  I've begun doing that too and second integration with git. I wonder though, why don't you embed your journal within the git log? Relevant commits of mine accompany a journal entry that goes after the empty line in the commit message, it makes for easy and contextual reading--these entries tend to be paragraph-sized though.
  - vinodkd 11y ago
    Two reasons: UX and intent UX: My next comment usually involves looking at my previous ones and keeping that flow. sometimes my journal has todos that i'm tracking; things like that.So having it all in one place is useful and the git log experience breaks that into two pieces: one to view the log to date and another to add a new log entry.There's probably an opportunity for a shell script that loads up the log in an editor, allows me to add an entry, diffs it on exit and auto commits. Sometimes i'll enter the same text in both my commit message and journal; and some other times my commit message essentially says "look at the journal, too detailed to list here". Intent: Sometimes I use the journal to track not just what i am doing but also what I should be doing. Alternate paths I want to try, philosophical sidebars on why I'm doing what I'm doing, etc. These entries explain to my future self why the project is in the state that I come back to it :). I'm not sure how I could put that into anything other than prose - since its not fully fleshed out code yet. I've tried design docs and that works sometimes, but usually I just want to jot down my thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness mode rather than figure out the right document to put the thought in. The journal works best for this. Later, I'll pull things from the journal into a design doc.
jacquesm 11y ago
In my case it would probably document the lack of progress rather than the progress. It's pretty hard to make steady progress on a number of tasks in parallel, the cost of context switching is huge.
- vinodkd 11y ago
  To counter this, I actually wrote a "Dont break the chain" app[1] that pulled contributions from all my local projects (since i have some that are not yet on github, some on bitbucket, etc) The idea was that I'd be happy if I made progress on at least one of them in general. Of course, I didnt finish that one either :) [1]https://github.com/vinodkd/dbtc https://github.com/vinodkd/dbtc
- joshsharp 11y ago
  I disagree, I think the cost of context switching each day is small given you're already "resetting" by going to bed each night. Looking back at my logs I make small progress every day on one of my 3 or so different projects.
dnautics 11y ago
I think this is what electronic science notebooks should look like.
chazu 11y ago
I dig it - I'd like to be able to use twitter for this (I suppose I could, nobody's stopping me) however I find that the twitter platform isn't really conducive to this sort of application - too much noise. A domain-specific tool like this has a place, I think.

43 points by joshsharp 11y ago

Congratulations for launching! What is / will be the difference between Littlelogs and Twitter e.x.? What wil make it special? I currently cannot check it out myself, I'm on the waiting list and don't have access yet, but from what I see it looks like no character limit? Will there be an API to pull down the updates and include them somewhere else, like on the project homepage? small bug report: I tried signing up with this description "im currently working on a self hosted CI server (leeroyCI) and a static site generated which will soon get a hosted web interface to make it comfortable." And I got s 500 error page. Replacing the description with "-" worked and let me sign up.

joshsharp 11y ago
Argh sorry. I've emailed you an invite instead.

stevenrossuk 11y ago

500 Server Error when I submitted my application, replaced description with "-" as fallenhitokiri mentioned.

joshsharp 11y ago
Should be fixed now, but I've emailed you an invite in the meantime. Sorry!

danschuller 11y ago

This is a neat. I like the idea and implementation! Reminds me a little of the .plan files from the old Quake days, mixed with twitter / social media. http://floodyberry.com/carmack/plan.html http://floodyberry.com/carmack/plan.html I've signed up. Here's my little log: http://littlelogs.co/rpgdan/ http://littlelogs.co/rpgdan/

WorldMaker 11y ago
For a brief period I had a server that polled Twitter and updated a .plan file from my tweets, simply because I could, but that was two or three Twitter API versions ago and I've also been using fewer and fewer unix boxen since then. Part of me wants to revisit the concept and run a Twitter over QOTD (port 17) server.

vinodkd 11y ago

I've been keeping journals for all my personal projects for quite some time now because I find it useful to "get context" when I go back to a particular project after some time. So something like this certainly piques my interest. My journal is usually a journal.md at the root of the project, like so: [1]. It has a very simple format: datetime stamp, text. Sometimes I use bullets and indented text, but its usually prose or code. Do you want to consider pulling journal updates directly from people's github as a feature? Of course, my kind of journal is a little too detailed - intended for me to pick up when I get back, but maybe a publicjournal.md which would be the author's ready-for-public-consumption version of the journal? [1]https://github.com/vinodkd/halo/blob/master/journal.md https://github.com/vinodkd/halo/blob/master/journal.md

goldfeld 11y ago
I've begun doing that too and second integration with git. I wonder though, why don't you embed your journal within the git log? Relevant commits of mine accompany a journal entry that goes after the empty line in the commit message, it makes for easy and contextual reading--these entries tend to be paragraph-sized though.
- vinodkd 11y ago
  Two reasons: UX and intent UX: My next comment usually involves looking at my previous ones and keeping that flow. sometimes my journal has todos that i'm tracking; things like that.So having it all in one place is useful and the git log experience breaks that into two pieces: one to view the log to date and another to add a new log entry.There's probably an opportunity for a shell script that loads up the log in an editor, allows me to add an entry, diffs it on exit and auto commits. Sometimes i'll enter the same text in both my commit message and journal; and some other times my commit message essentially says "look at the journal, too detailed to list here". Intent: Sometimes I use the journal to track not just what i am doing but also what I should be doing. Alternate paths I want to try, philosophical sidebars on why I'm doing what I'm doing, etc. These entries explain to my future self why the project is in the state that I come back to it :). I'm not sure how I could put that into anything other than prose - since its not fully fleshed out code yet. I've tried design docs and that works sometimes, but usually I just want to jot down my thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness mode rather than figure out the right document to put the thought in. The journal works best for this. Later, I'll pull things from the journal into a design doc.

jacquesm 11y ago

In my case it would probably document the lack of progress rather than the progress. It's pretty hard to make steady progress on a number of tasks in parallel, the cost of context switching is huge.

vinodkd 11y ago
To counter this, I actually wrote a "Dont break the chain" app[1] that pulled contributions from all my local projects (since i have some that are not yet on github, some on bitbucket, etc) The idea was that I'd be happy if I made progress on at least one of them in general. Of course, I didnt finish that one either :) [1]https://github.com/vinodkd/dbtc https://github.com/vinodkd/dbtc
joshsharp 11y ago
I disagree, I think the cost of context switching each day is small given you're already "resetting" by going to bed each night. Looking back at my logs I make small progress every day on one of my 3 or so different projects.

dnautics 11y ago

I think this is what electronic science notebooks should look like.

chazu 11y ago

I dig it - I'd like to be able to use twitter for this (I suppose I could, nobody's stopping me) however I find that the twitter platform isn't really conducive to this sort of application - too much noise. A domain-specific tool like this has a place, I think.