However, since yesterday, I started to see very old tweets on my HootSuite for iPhone. Very weird… Even Tweets from last year ! But only from one of my friends, no one else… See screenshot here:

And this only happens on the iPhone app. On HootSuite web site directly, I see no problem. So, is this a problem from HootSuite, from their iĥone app, or is this something wrong with this friend of mine ?

Emails are at the very root of my professional life. It needs to be “in the cloud” and accessible 24/7 from anywhere in the world.

I don’t want to download them locally,  update or troubleshoot a local application, and I don’t want a large overhead. And let’s face it; none of the email clients currently on the market can even remotely compete with GMail’s outstanding features like threaded emails, filters, labels and all those cools Labs features.

Unfortunately, this has also created a serious problem.

When I switched everything to Google Apps two and a half years ago, I archive nearly every email, but this came with a price: For the last year, I’ve been using 95% of my 7Gb quota.

I’ve read all there is to read on GMail size control. I’m:

• Using custom searches to delete old emails with attachments.
• Using filters to locate and remove repetitive messages.
• Eliminating emails and mailing lists I don’t need.

I did everything I could think of, and they did get me through the last year, but the size is still increasing all the time.

One option I read about involved downloading old emails to a local email client and deleting them from GMail. This clearly defeats the purpose of not storing emails locally, but I didn’t see any other option. Also, a friend of mine recently told me he upgraded to Ubuntu 10.4, which came with Thunderbird 3. This version seemed to be a complete rewrite with a lot of cool features and it looked good!

So, I thought I’d try to get Thunderbird on my Ubuntu 9.10 install. Well, Ubuntu 9.10 comes with Thunderbird 2.x, and you can’t upgrade to Thunderbird 3 very easily, but after some Googling, I found How To Install Thunderbird 3 Shredder in Ubuntu 9.10.

Great! And it’s easy too:

• Add the Mozilla PPA in your source list using: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa
• Update source list using: sudo apt-get update
• Install Thunderbird 3 using:sudo apt-get install thunderbird-3.0

All I had to do was restart, and the Thunderbird 3 was working! I configured it to synchronize with GMail’s IMAP, messed around a bit to synchronize the ‘All Mail’ folder only, and learned how to delete a message in GMail without deleting it locally. Unfortuantely, this took ages since I had more than 100 000 emails. In the end, I simply gave up. Too much trouble, too long, and too complex!

I read about using a new GMail account to store/archive old messages. Still, complex…The last solution I had was to upgrade our Google Apps account to Google Apps Premium, which would give us (and me ) 25 Gb of storage per account, but I would still run into the limit problem sooner or later…

Suddenly it hit me!

What am I trying to achieve? I want to keep emails forever, but is that really what I want to do ? In a time where information usually loses its relevance a few hours after its release, why would I want to keep emails forever? I realized it isn’t the emails I want to save at all. I want the important information.

Now, I use Highrise to manage my interactions with the people/subjects that matter. I forward very message with value to Highrise. So I have a copy of those that matter anyway, right ? As for the rest, do they really matter? Is it really a problem if I don’t have an email someone sent me a year ago?

I’m starting to see the problem the other way around. Why should I bother trying to keep emails archived forever? Instead, I realize I should focus on making sure the emails that really matter go to Highrise. Now, instead of focusing on the 80% (and more!) of useless emails that crowd my inbox, I can focus on the 20% (and even less) that really matter!

What do you think? How do you manage your emails? How long do you keep them? And why?

I created an account on Posterous: http://marcan.posterous.com. I linked this account to my Twitter account, as well as my professional blog: http://malanciault.com.

I'm now actually writing this in an email which will be sent to my posterous email dropbox. If everything works as it should, this should create a new post on marcan.posterous.com, it should then get tweeted on my Twitter account, and then posted on malanciault.com. Oh, and it will also be posted on my Facebook account as I'm using the Twitter App on Facebook to automatically post my tweets on my Facebook account.

Fiew ! Round of applause for the Web 2.0 !

Now let's see how this will work. Hitting the Send button now…

Posted via email from Marc-André Lanciault

A year and a half later, many things have change. SourceForge did a hell of a good job implementing new features and improving their site usability. And they added Trac! In the meantime, CVSDude also added many new features, and then changed their plans, and their name. We have now reach a point where we are no more satisfied with CVSDude and we had to decide to go back to our first love .

But importing SVN repositories from one provider to another comes with its challenge. At least for me! I had never done this before and had to learn the hard way. But SourceForge support was outstanding, much better then what I remembered! So Kudos guys!

Along the way, I’ve learned quite a few things, which I think are worth sharing, or, at the very least, worth documenting for me, in case I ever need to do this again, hopefully, not with ImpressCMS repositories. We are there to stay with with SourceForge!

Backup first!

So, how did you import an SVN repository on SourceForge ? Well, the very first thing I recommend before importing a dump is to first take a backup of your repository. So if something goes wrong, you can restore it easily. Open a Putty session or a Terminal, and run this command, where projectname is the UNIX name of your project.

rsync -av projectname.svn.sourceforge.net::svn/projectname/*

This will copy your entire repository to your local computer. Then, issue this command to create a dump of your repository:

svnadmin dump projectname >filename.dump

Interactive Shell Session

Ok, so we have a backup, now on to next step, for which you need Shell Access permission on your SourceForge account. If you don’t have it, ask your administrator. Then open an interactive shell session, using Putty or a Terminal:

ssh -t username,projectname@shell.sourceforge.net create

Where, of course username is your SourceFogre username. Keep in mind that your session will remain open for 4 hours. All sessions are terminated after this time.

Once you have created your session, you can access it after (but within 4 hours) by using this:

ssh username,projectname@shell.sourceforge.net

Uploading the dumps

Ok, now, we need to upload the SVN dumps on SourecForge to be able to import them. Of course, I had previously contacted CVSDude to ask them to create SVN dump of our 2 repositories. I downloaded them and now they sit on my Desktop on a folder named dumps.

But first, let’s create a folder on SourceForge to receive the dumps. So from the interactive shell:

mkdir dumps

Using SCP, we can easily upload those on SourecForge. Opening a new Terminal, I used this:

scp -r -p /home/myusername/Desktop/dumps/* ssh -t malanciault,impresscms@shell.sourceforge.net:~/dumps/

It is a good idea to compress the dumps before you upload them. Will take less time. In my case, the 2 dumps were totalizing nearly 1 Gb. So it took a while… But when everything was there, I extracted the dumps. So from the interactive shell:

cd dumps
gzip -d core.gz
gzip -d addons.gz

Cleaning up the repository

Then, we need to use svnadmin to lock the repository and create a working copy where we will be able to do what we want:

adminrepo –checkout svn

Ok now, I want to erase what we currently have and then load the CVSDude dumps. To clean up the repository and start from scratch, you can do this (BUT PLEASE, make sure you did a backup first !):

rm -rf /svnroot/projectname/*

So the repository is gone, let’s create a new one:

svnadmin create /svnroot/projectname

Then you need to save your change:

adminrepo –save

Importing !!

So our repository was now emptied. Great! Using my SVN client (I’m using Subclipse within EasyEclipse), I connected to the repository and created 2 remote folders, addons and core. In the first one, I’ll load the core.dump and on the second one, the addons.core.

Back in the interactive shell, I need to checkout the repository again:

adminrepo –checkout svn

Then, load the core.dump into the core folder:

svnadmin load /svnroot/impresscms –parent-dir core < dumps/core.dump

And the addons.dump into the addons folder:

svnadmin load /svnroot/impresscms –parent-dir addons < dumps/addons.dump

And we save everything:

adminrepo –save

And you are done. Two repositories, imported into a single one!

More info

Should you want to read a little bit more on all this, here are a few documentation links which allowed me to complete this process:

• Using rsync for backups
• SourceForge Interactive Shell Service
• Subversion Import Instructions
• Reseting a repository from scratch

But then, it started to do something similar in Freshbooks.

Again, not a big problem, but just enough to make me want to find a solution. Since it was not “site-related”, my second guess was that it might be addons related. So, one by one, I disabled every Firefox addon I’m using, restarting Firefox every time. When all the plugins were disabled, the problem was still there. Mmmmm…

So I went for the drastic solution: starting from scratch with an all new Firefox profile. I closed Firefox and went in /home/myusername/.mozilla/ and renamed firefox into firefox_backup. Restarted Firefox. A fresh new vanilla profile was created. And the problem was gone!

But then, I needed to re-install all addons, setup passwords again, importing bookmarks, etc… So, to avoid this in the future, once my Firefox was all configured properly again, I created a tarball of /home/myusername/.mozilla/firefox .

If anyone had a similar problem and find a better solution, please let me know!

I have found two interesting cheat sheets explaining the syntax you need to know to be able to quickly format text in Basecamp. I’ll give you the link at the end of this post, but, for the sake of  “getting things done” , here is what I think you need to know. In fact, I use Basecamp on a daily basis and those are the only elements I’m using, 99% of the time: displaying links and lists.

Display a link

To display a link, simply use the following syntax: “text”:link. Here is an example:

My professional blog is “here”:http://malanciault.com.

In Basecamp, the previous would be displayed exactly like this:

My professional blog is here.

Display lists

To display bullet list or numbered list, simply us * or #. Here is an example:

* bullet item 1

* bullet item 2

* bullet item 3

# number 1

# number 2

# number 3

The previous would be displayed like this:

bullet item 1

bullet item 2

bullet item 3

number 3

number 1

number 2

That’s it! For more comprehensive syntax elements, have a look at these two interesting cheat sheets:

• http://warpedvisions.org/projects/textile-cheat-sheet/
• http://www.tildemark.com/at-work/formating-messages-in-basecamp-using-textile.html

But GoToMeeting has one main issue: it does not work on Linux… And, I can not go back to Windows for my main desktop OS, I would go crazy! So I use Webex on a daily basis, and once a week I use GoToMeeting for a conference I’m doing with people at ImpressCMS which needs to be recorded. I have to do this on my wife’s laptop though, as she has Windows .

Anyway, since I switched to Ubuntu 9.10, I could not run Webex. It was telling me that Java was not enabled in my browser. I did not had time to look into it, so I was using my second laptop which still has Ubuntu 8.04. But today, I found 5 minutes and solved the problem. It was that Sun Java Runtime Environment (JRE) needed to be installed. I found the info in this great post which, by the way, has a lot of other very useful tips for people on Ubuntu Karmic Koala.

The solution to my Webex problem: close Firefox and run this command from Terminal:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin

Fired up Firefox and created a Webex meeting. Everything works perfectly!

I started looking for a solution and find this one. A very interesting solution. Jan has made a patch to edit the Tag cloud widget to add an option for nofollow tag. Unfortunately, his change was not accepted by the WordPress team because average user would not understand what the nofollow setting does. Which makes sense by the way and explains why WordPress is so great. They always ensure that by default, an average user will understand what he sees. I like that. And anyway, plugins exists specifically for that reason: adding extra things you need!

So Jan is proposing an alternative. Simply add this code at the end of your wp-congig.php file, which works perfectly:

add_filter( 'wp_generate_tag_cloud', 'my_nofollow_tag_cloud_example' );
function my_nofollow_tag_cloud_example( $text ) {
	return preg_replace_callback('|<a>|i', 'wp_rel_nofollow_callback', $text);
}
</a>

However, I also find a plugin that does exactly this. It’s basically the same code, but added in a plugin so no change is required on core file. Also, if you want to add the nofollow attribute on the tag links disokayed on bottom of each post, you can simply uncomment the last line in the plugin file:

//the_tags
add_filter('the_tags', 'szub_nofollow_tag');  // uncomment this line to hit tag links from the_tags()

And this is the plugin I’m now using here. Thank you thinkjayant and WordPress community!

People reading this blog already know I’m a 37signals evangelist, so no surprises that we are using Basecamp at INBOX. But really, I’m more of a “what’s-the-best-tool-to-get-things-done” evangelist. What do we want to accomplish, what do we need ? Then let’s find the best tool to do it. This is why we use Basecamp and Springloops. And you know what the best thing is ? Springloops can talk to Basecamp!So what are those tools ? Well first, let me remind my readers of what we do at INBOX. We are a Web development company building Web sites and Web applications based on Open Source technologies. So we live on the Web. It’s our turf, our playground, our passion! But to do the job right, we need the right tools.

Managing a project

First, we need to manage projects. There are a million project management tools out there. From the simple tasks management software to the full blown Microsoft Project beast, you have a gazilion options, and you can pay from 1$ to a million $. But most of these tools don’t focus on what’s really important in managing a project: communication. For sure, if you work alone, you don’t need to bother yourself about communication. But as soon as you start to dream of something bigger for your commpany, you need to start working with other people. And what’s they key when working with other people ? Communication! The rest is nearly irrelevant.

So Basecamp does communication beautifully! Everything is done to make the user experience quick and easy so we can focus on communicating to other people in the team: sending messages, creating milestone, todo list, writeboard, etc…

Manage code

And then comes Springloops. But what is it ? I briefly discussed this in a recent post. But, as they say themselves:

Springloops is a unique source code management tool focused on web development teams. It allows you to code in parallel and share your code safely concentrated on results, not on lost changes or overwritten files. You get rapid collaboration in protected space. Thanks to the project management perspective it serves the getting things done attitude. Moreover, Springloops reduces repeatable activities in your day-to-day work. It makes great things simple.

Translated into geeky talk: Springloops is an SVN service but with great added features like a neat interface, pretty changesets, great code browser, easily review of changes, instant preview, etc. And the feature that saved us many hours every week are the deployment servers. For every project we have, we setup a development and a production server. On the dev server, we enable the Autp-Update feature, which will automatically deploy every changes after each commit. So basically, a developer fix a bug then commits it. His change gets automatically deployed on the dev server. The developer can then confirm that the bug is fixed, and then, via Springloops, he select Update to revision X on the production server and hits the Now button. Changes will then be deployed on the production server.

Linking both!

Great, but how about the integration between both ? That’s another great part! Ok, so we have a project in Basecamp:

• We create Milestones (the different steps we need to reach in this project
• For each Milestone, we create Todo lists
• In each Todo lists, we create todo items which we can assign to someone and we can set a due date (both optionals)

An example Todo list could be:

Then, because we have a corresponding project on Springloops, linked to its Basecamp project, when we go in Springloops and look at the To-Do tab for this very project, we can now see this:

The todo list we created in Basecamp is now in Springloops. And each item has a specific number associated to it. So, the developer fix a bug and in his commit message, he can use something like:

Fixed todo:49408491

Springloops will detect that this commit is linked to item 49408491 and will fetch the description of this item and use it as the log message:

Moreover, Springloops will also check this todo item as completed on Basecamp, so you don’t actually need to mark it as checked yourself.

Development Roundup

Optionally, you can also configure Springloops to create a new message in Basecamp on every commit, daily or weekly. I think daily is a good setup. So, everyday, a message will be posted on Basecamp with the summary of what was committed. You can even notify people in the project if you want. To set this up, in Springloops, go in the Log tab and click on top right on Message log to Basecamp:

In conclusion

So, really, Basecamp and Springloops are a great combination for us. It streamlines the process, everything is tracked, everything is centralized. What would we do without these great tools!

So I posted on the Ubuntu forums to ask people what email client software they were recommending on Ubuntu. Some recommended Evolution, others Thunderbird or some other software I don’t recall. But one guy said something like:

Dude, why do you need an email client software? Use Gmail! What more could you possibly need ?

Interesting… I had not thought of it. We were already using Google Apps at INBOX since 2006 and our mail was already all managed by Google. But I was previously using Outlook to fetch emails from my Google Apps email account. Outlook… now that I think of it, what an amazing un-productive tool! Everything sucks in it… Anyway, I’m diverging.

So I decided to give it a try. I started using the web interface of Google Apps emails. Fist, you can access it from anywhere in the world. You only need an Internet connection and a browser. Second, it comes free with 7 GB of storage. 7 GB! Although for me it will soon not be enough, still, for 80% of people, it’s about 7 times more then what they’ll ever need in 10 years!

And then come the true great features. While I was used to sort in Outlook, now I can actually use Google powerful search to search through my emails. I can use ” “, [], -, AND, OR, basically any operators to find virtually anything!

More, while I was used to categorize emails in folders, now I can label them! And any email can have more multiple labels!

And you think it’s enough ? Hell no! Filters!!! You can create any kind of filters you want to automatically label, move, delete, archive or even send a predefine reply to any emails coming in!

Oh and another very unique feature of Google mail: the threaded messages. You know when you receive an email and you reply and then others reply as well and you reply again and so on ? Well, in Outlook, this would create 15 new messages in your inbox. In Google email, they would all be displayed into a single thread. You click on it and all the messages that were exchanged with this same subject will be displayed one after another.

And then you archive it, so it will get out of your inbox. But then, 6 months later, someone will reply in this thread. Well, it will pop again in your inbox for you to read, with all the previous messages collapsed for you to uncollapse if you need to remember what this discussion was all about.

Bloody brilliant as my friend David from the UK would say!

So in conclusion, switching to Ubuntu was a great move, but starting to use Google web mail interface was simply a life saver!