(I’m shy to say publicly what I paid for it but if you tell me privately what you think it’s worth I’ll tell you what I actually paid.)
As you can see if you click the link, I want to offer the domain as an incentive for someone to build a better TagTime. What do you all think?
Here’s a crazy idea I just had:
Starting now, anyone who wants to work on this starts tagging their time ttc (for “TagTime for the Cloud” or “TagTime.Com”) and we consider the domain to be shared in proportion to how many ttc pings you get. Then if we want to unshare it then whoever values it the most can buy out everyone else’s shares.
The obvious objection is that someone could spin their wheels, spending a lot of time without ending up producing much. My feeling is that time spent tends to be a good enough proxy for value produced though. I’ll start tagging my own time on this ttc in any case. (I just got pinged writing this, which I’m totally counting.)
But I’m open to whatever feels fair. I really just want for this to exist!
Do you mean sharing in the sense of letting each other see our ttc tags? I figured it would just be honor system. I’ve gotten pinged 3 times so far, including just now writing this sentence, which I’m counting as legit overhead for helping make tagtime-in-the-cloud happen.
If you mean sharing in the sense of sharing the domain name, I mean we count up the total number of ttc pings everyone got and call that the denominator. So if you all collectively get pinged 97 times working on this and I have my 3 ttc pings then that’s 100 total pings, 3 of which are mine, so I’d have 3% ownership of the domain name.
Cool, thanks! I started working on this. I’m not sure how much time I will have for it in the coming weeks, but hopefully I will be able to this summer.
I figured I should probably respond here so we can all collaborate effectively and/or compete fiercely!
So: since January, I’ve been dogfooding my own version of “TTC”–it pings you via slack (and an optional hastily/poorly written desktop client that makes lots of absurd assumptions about your machine, like “you are running Linux and have dmenu installed and feel like running a giant uberjar to replace a tiny perl script”).
Ideally someday it will come with a cool online dashboard where you can visualize your time. For now I just have a barebones matrix plot (“ttc” pings highlighted, of course–days are on the X axis, time on the Y):
… plus a table showing ping counts and time estimates for each one.
I don’t want to give out the URL in public yet because this is in crazy-super-alpha stage right now. But I am actively working on this and looking forward to having actual users sometime soon. If anyone is interested in checking it out, email me at j@eeh.io!
It’s definitely still in alpha stage, but my implementation (currently called “TicTag”) is up at https://agh.io/about if anyone wants to kick the tires. Feel free to sign up, test things out, complain about any issues you run into, tell me about features you want, etc!
I haven’t pinned down very well the terms of the carrot-dangling. A thing I meant to emphasize more is pareto-dominance of the Perl TagTime. Which I think will be surprisingly hard given that it involves things like Vim macros to easily batch-edit past pings, not to mention a native client. Maybe even a way to macro-expand tags, though that’s not actually difficult. Anyway, maybe more realistic is just getting it to the point where I want to migrate from the Perl version to the cloud version, with or without full feature parity.
But we’re all super fair-minded so if we just make the maximally awesome things happen we can have faith that we’ll figure out how to share the spoils fairly! (:
I guess the thing to pin down is what happens exactly if you have ttc pings but don’t end up having made a contribution to the eventual product. Or you make what arguably should be the definitive TagTime-in-the-cloud but some esoteric feature keeps me personally preferring the Perl version. Maybe we can just say that community consensus can decide what’s fair and reasonable?
PS: Let me also paste in for posterity and possible future adjudication the vaguely stated offer as it originally appeared on tagtime.com:
Now, what to actually do with the domain? We still can’t afford the distraction from Beeminder but we really want a proper cloud-based version of TagTime to exist. Something that has all the nerdy features we depend on (including Beeminder integration of course) but is also usable by normal people.
If you want to build that then we’d like to give you the domain name.
So maybe a reasonable interpretation of that plus what I’ve said in this thread is that, for all people who contribute to the eventual TagTime-in-the-cloud that replaces the Perl version, including for supernerds, we divvy the domain name based on ttc pings.
Speaking of TagTime implementations that pareto-dominate the Perl version, @alice’s version – https://github.com/alice0meta/TagTime – may well already do so. Alice wrote it in Node Webkit and she started porting it to Electron (then known as Atom Shell) but didn’t have time to finish that.
So it’s possibly tricky for someone who isn’t her to pick up where she left off but in theory it’s not hard to get working and finish porting.
When @alice walked me through installing it, before starting the Electron port, it worked amazingly. Batch-editing, macro-expansion, you name it. It’s super nice. The only problem was that Node Webkit, at least back then, would randomly crash, so you couldn’t trust it to ping you.
I was inspired by @alice’s direction to implement an Electron version. I didn’t manage to pick up where she left off, so I’m afraid anything particularly nice in that version hasn’t necessarily made it to mine!
Plenty more I want to do with it, but right now I think you can use it for collecting pings, maybe. Look at the open issues for caveats.
This looks great, but it’s not working for me - it’s not pinging me on slack.
Also there are no installation instructions for the desktop client - I’m guessing it needs to be built from source currently?
What’s the best way to contact you? I actually googled TicTag up yesterday after deciding to try TagTime again, and was reminding of this thread today.
@bluetulip, just email me at ttc@agh.io! If you send me your username or
email, I’ll dig in and see what’s going on with your slack messages–
sorry about that, thanks so much for letting me know that there’s a bug!
If you’re running linux and have xdialog installed, the desktop client
is a seriously half-baked solution, but should work. Running “go get github.com/johnswanson/ttc” should install it, assuming you have go
installed and a GOPATH set up. Right now, because I’ve been spending
time on the site itself much more than the app, it just pops up a
dialog box for pings and then sends it off to agh.io–not pretty, not
very smart (e.g. it won’t save pings locally if you don’t have an
internet connection, doesn’t really handle errors gracefully), just a
slapdash thing I haven’t really gotten ready for anyone else to use.
At some point, another way to get something working quickly might be to
take one of the other awesome-looking (or at least better-working and
more cross-platform) desktop clients and just add a hook after pings to
send off an HTTP request. But yeah, haven’t had time yet!
Thanks again for the bug report and for contacting me–always super
motivating to hear from someone else actually using TTC!
Hi,
I have been beeminding for a while but had not used tagtime. I saw the inspiring guest blog from Brent Yorgey. I decided that I needed to create a tagtime that anybody can use (no nerdiness or geekiness required). Luckily my good friend Charles got equally excited and we are working together on this. There is a lot of work already done.
I have a request - could you please take this simple survey. It would Charles and me when we decide on the design.
I will share the results of this survey here when it is done.
As promised we will be sharing the TagTime survey results with the community soon. I’m just working on making a few pie charts and summarising the results to make them interesting.
