Today I killed the old Mind Traffic Control on Google App Engine. And replaced it with a new, fairly basic, site. (Though one that’s quite pretty, in a Packt Publishing kind of way.)
This is the beginning of a whole new MTC ecosystem.
1) I’m no longer interested in hosting your todos on Google App Engine. The only functionality that’s left on the site is the “export”. You can get the tasks you put into the old MTC in one of .txt, .csv or .opml formats.
.txt means you can use either an ordinary text editor, todo.txt or the new command-line based mtc program on your own machine.
.csv means you can use a spreadsheet if you prefer
.opml can be read into an outliner such as OWL.
2) The site has a new mission. Right now, it’s simply pointing visitors to the two pieces of software that I use to manage my todos and information : MTC command-line (in Racket) and OWL (in its three different versions : desktop, Android and web-served).
These are currently all simply source-code, hosted on GitHub. (Both MTC-racket and OWL are free-software, under the GPL).
It’s a geek view. But going forward, I’m going to be preparing, packaging and documenting these for actual users.
3) Right now, I still don’t know the relationship between MTC and OWL. They’re different programs, with different “mind traffic geometry”, in different languages. But I use both and I’m constantly musing about how they can and should interact.
The only thing which is clear to me at the moment, is that they should be brought together under the common Mind Traffic Control “brand”. As a statement of intent.
The question of 2014 is getting resolved.
4) “What about Project ThoughtStorms?”, you ask.
Well, I tend to think of “Project ThoughtStorms” as the developers’ view on my knowledge management / personal productivity software. While “Mind Traffic Control” is the user perspective.
There’s more to it than that. Project ThoughtStorms covers my experiments and add-ons to the Smallest Federated Wiki and thinking about wiki in general. MTC heavily emphasizes the dynamic flow of tasks. But that’s the broadest overview.
In practice I’ll continue to refer to MTC-racket and OWL within the contexts of both Mind Traffic Control and Project ThoughtStorms.
5) I am VERY happy to be deleting code. And collapsing several different overlapping ideas and codebases into … er … fewer. It’s a therapeutic decluttering that’s clearing space in my mind, and helping me focus and drive the surviving projects forward faster. It’s good.
But there is just a slight twinge of sadness. As I realize that this is a mile-stone in letting go of Python, a language I had a long and passionate engagement with. Both the old MTC code-base AND the server-side PageStore of OWL are Python.
But since porting OWL to Electron I can see that its future is very much in the Javascript (node / CoffeeScript) camp. Meanwhile the new MTC codebase is in Racket. And my latest quick conversion script persuades me that Racket is a good language for other small-scale tools. I have about a dozen of them in Python. But I’m pretty sure that new development in these areas will almost certainly be Lisp. (Racket or Clojure).
(Actually there is a project that’s still in Python where you’ll see some further development soon … but I’ll leave that to another post.)