Month: March 2007

I love Actiontastic. I really do. After I realized how much I was relying on it, I read a few Django tutorials and started work on an open-source clone. The morning I was going to release my clone to the world, the author of Actiontastic announced he was going to open source Actiontastic. *sigh*

Anyway, he pledges a sweet XHTML/CSS export eventually, but until then, there is no export. However, the data is stored in an sqlite database, so I wrote a little bit of python to export actions to plain text.

Pretty pictures first!

Screenshots:

This is a python script, intended for use in the terminal or in scripts. To use in the terminal, extract the zip, and open a terminal. Use cd to enter the directory of the zip, and run python actiontastic-exporter.py. For help and options, run python actiontastic-exporter.py -h.

If you extracted it to your desktop, it will be like this:

cd ~/Desktop/actiontastic-exporter-v0.1/
python actiontastic-exporter.py
python actiontastic-exporter.py -h

It can export the output to a file. It can read from an alternative input sqlite database. It can put a little more information in the exports if you want, and it will sort by project or context. It preserves action ordering within projects and contexts.

It ignores actions that are in the inbox, and ignores completed actions.

Actiontastic Exporter requires Python 2.4. This is newer than the python shipped with any Mac at this point, and I debated on writing my own sorted() so that people could use this without upgrading their python install. However, since Actiontastic Exporter requires pysqlite2, which doesn’t come stock, and the python install is *so* easy, I decided to use the builtin.

Requires:

• Python 2.4 or newer – Available packaged for the Mac at http://www.pythonmac.org/packages/
• Pysqlite2 or newer – Available at http://www.initd.org/tracker/pysqlite/wiki/pysqlite.

It never writes to the database, but if it destroys your Actiontastic database, please don’t be angry at me. Please backup your ~/Library/Application Support/Actiontastic.sqlite.

Anyway, you can download Actiontastic Exporter at the main project page at http://feelslikeburning.com/projects/actiontastic-exporter/.

Any feature requests, questions, or comments, feel free to comment below or email me using the contact form.

The project page is located at http://feelslikeburning.com/projects/gregarius-sticky-exporter/.

I use Gregarius for my feed aggregator and reader. I’ve had a busy semester, and have marked close to 2000 items as “sticky” so I can read them when I have more time. I don’t like the built-in “Browse Sticky” functionality, and would prefer something basic, but flat. I want to be able to save it, and use it to check off what I’ve read in my massive backlog of items.

I waded through the PHP and SQL, and talked with Matthew a bit, and came up with a little .php file.

You can download it at http://files.feelslikeburning.com/gregarius-sticky-exporter/gregarius-sticky-exporter.zip.

To install, download the zip, extract it, put your database information in, and upload it to your webhost. Hit the page with your web browser, and it should generate the list. It doesn’t modify your database at all.

It doesn’t contain all the information in the tables, just the title, the url, and the body of each feed. The title is linked to the url, and the body is displayed after the titles. If you’re interested in something extra in your exports, feel free to contact me.