WebConso for WorkSpy

 Name                    Last modified      Size  Description
 Parent Directory                             -   
 WebConso.zip            10-Nov-2003 19:05  505K  

[ See some screen shots ]

WebConso is used in conjunction with WorkSpy, written by Patrick Dantressangle.

WorkSpy is a little program that makes it extremely easy to keep track of how much time you spend on your projects. Click on a project, and WorkSpy ticks off the time you spend on it. Click PAUSE when you are interrupted by a phone call. Your manager comes in to discuss another project? Click the project and discuss. Forget to click the correct project? It's okay, double-click to easily edit the time.

WorkSpy comes with WorkConso, which consolidates the task files and presents a report of how much time you spent on each project. Patrick has also included a feature that allows you to associate a file to each task, for example a text file, Word document, or whatever.

Download WorkSpy and play with it a bit, it's great. If you like it, come back and try WebConso, too!

WebConso is free and offered under the GNU Public License. I came up with WebConso because I wanted to take advantage of the Web to record and view the Notes associated with each WorkSpy project. The Notes are my to do list, and every two weeks provide a quick status report I can give to my manager. I've also included a 3 month calendar, which I use to get a glimpse of the important items (without the clutter of meetings that are in my regular calendar).

Prerequisites

You need WorkSpy, of course. :-) You also need a Web server and Perl installed and configured with the modules described below.

Installation

1. Download and unzip the files to a temporary location on your workstation.

2. Copy the files in the cgi-bin directory to an executable directory that your Web server can access (for example, "C:\Apache Group\Apache2\cgi-bin\").

3. If you are using the Apache Web server, ensure the first line of every script in the cgi-bin directory contains the correct path to the Perl.exe file.

   1. Run this handy perl option to locate the path to perl:

      perl -V:perlpath

   2. You can use a perl one-liner to replace the first line of every script with the correct path:

      cd cgi-bin perl -pi.bak -e "s/^#!C:\\.*/#!full_path_to_perl.exe/;" * del *.bak

4. Install the following perl modules:

   Date::Calc

   Thanks to Steffen Beyer for this great module. If you have ActivePerl, installing it is very easy:

   ppm install Date::Calc

   HTML::CalendarMonthSimple

   Not available with PPM, but it's still fairly easy to install. Thanks to Gregor Mosheh for this wonderful module.

   1. Download and unzip the latest version of the module package.

   2. Copy CalendarMonthSimple.pm to the HTML directory in one of your Perl lib paths. If you don't know where that is, query perl's @INC variable.

      perl -e "print qq(@INC)" C:/Perl/lib C:/Perl/site/lib . copy CalendarMonthSimple.pm C:/Perl/site/lib/HTML

5. Edit the file consoinits.pl and change the following variables as appropriate: $WorkSpyPath, $NotesArchivePath, and $eventsfile.

6. After you've used WorkSpy and have created some tasks and notes, load one of the scripts in your browser and check it out.

   http://localhost/cgi-bin/conso

Other useful things

• I've included some sample WorkSpy time and notes files to give you a feel for what a ToDo list and Web Consolidation might look like.

• You can launch a script from a shortcut, such as the todo list from your start menu. If you have IE, the easiest way to do this if you have Windows 2000 or XP is to:

  1. Manually type in the URL, such as: http://127.0.0.1/cgi-bin/todo.

  2. Drag the icon from IE's Address bar to wherever you want it to be in your start menu.

• Perhaps you want to launch your todo list at a scheduled time every morning. You can create a batch file and run the file as a scheduled task.

  @echo off :: ... other startup items ... start c:\progra~1\intern~1\iexplore.exe http://localhost/cgi-bin/todo @exit