So I was reading the list of changes from LJ<http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Dreamwidth_changes_from_LJ>again, and I saw: An improved to-do list, allowing for better task management.
And I have to ask myself: why? The LJ to-do list was only ever about quarter-assed. The limits on it are *ridiculous* (25 items for basic? 25? That doesn't cover my *shopping* list. The details limit appears to be about 100 *characters*. You have to have a paid account to have any privacy.) It's currently not even listed in the site map. I have ... great difficulty believing that anyone who actually wishes to have an on-line to do list is using LJ's crippled feature (as a to-do list, anyway. It might have some salutary re-purposing use that I haven't imagined, but it's completely inadequate as a to-do list.) The thing about it *is*, the on-line to-do list problem has been, if not licked, meticulously studied and tackled, in a variety of ways that work for a wide variety of people out there. My favorite is rememberthemilk.com, but there's also tadalist, todoist, google offers something through both igoogle and g-mail, voo2do, etc., etc., etc. <http://lifehacker.com/tag/to_do-list/> And considering that there's an awful lot that dreamwidth is going to do that is integral to making the site work better as journal/blog/cms/personal publishing platform/bulletin board and considering that other people do this particular task ten million times better than the existing code, I have to ask myself ... why not just integrate the existing better solutions and not spend developer hours on something that's been awful in LJ since it was first rolled out? I would propose a two step solution, of, first, allowing people to enter two URLs that show up on their profile (journal?) page (and for which, of course, they control their level of privacy): one to their personal online to-do list and one to the URL to enter a new task, if it is a separate URL from viewing the list. And then, somewhere further down the line, as it becomes clearer which online task managers are favored by DW users, work on integrating the more popular ones more fully into people's journals, so they can display the tasks on their journal (or profile? pages) instead of navigating away from the site to view them. (I have a vision of something integrated into the sidebar, in a vaguely gmail gadget-y away, but it's an extremely mist-y vision.) And maybe also having a journal entry appear as a task, if someone is feeling extraordinarily clever and accomplishy. --zvi
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