📗 Dynalist Manual

Documentation & Support Collaboration
1

(Initial writeup of this documentation by @matthias; welcome to contribute.)

Content

1. Introduction

2. Getting started with Dynalist

3. Creating tasks

4. Get notifications about new tasks

5. Working on tasks

6. Managing a project

7. Dynalist tips and tricks

8. Adapting the Dynalist appearance

9. Keeping backups

10. Design rationale

1. Introduction

After failed attempts at task management with OpenProject :lock: and Discourse wikis :lock:, we finally found Dynalist. Dynalist is a realtime collaborative editor for task lists (and any other lists). Editing happens like in Google Docs (“everyone writes at the same time and all is saved automatically”).

This topic documents how to use Dynalist when working with the Edgeryders company. In short, use it for all tasks in the company’s projects, including the full breakdown of projects into tasks, sub-tasks etc
 So far, tasks were assigned via Matrix chat, Discourse posts, Discourse messages, even e-mail. To not miss any task or deadline, assignees needed their own personal task management solution, and needed to manually enter received tasks there – which was a lot of administrative overhead, plus it meant private lists where progress was not visible by collaborators. So instead, from now on consider a task only “properly assigned” when you put it into Dynalist and told the assignee.

We are in the early stages of our task management with Dynalist. Go here to help with your feedback, ideas, and perhaps with software development for integrating it with our Matrix or Discourse software.

2. Getting started with Dynalist

As an Edgeryders collaborator who is on the team of a current Edgeryders company project, you should create a Dynalist account and start task-based collaboration there now:

  1. Sign up to Dynalist.

  2. Request access to the “Edgeryders Tasks” document. Ask @matthias or another Edgeryders company director to grant you access to the Edgeryders Tasks document, mentioning the e-mail address you used to register your Dynalist account. (Details for admins :speech_balloon:)

  3. Accept the invitation to the document. When the person you contacted shares the Edgeryders Tasks dynalist with you, you will receive an e-mail “{name} shared “Edgeryders tasks” with you”. Click the “Accept” button in that e-mail to get access to the document.

  4. Open the Edgeryders Tasks document. After login to Dynalist of course. You also find it in the left-side “file pane” sidebar in your Dynalist account.

  5. Figure out the basics.

    • Folding and unfolding. When hovering over a list item, click the “+” or “-” symbol to unfold / fold it, or press Ctrl+..

    • Zooming. To focus on one particular item (for example a task and its sub-tasks), click the “:mag:” icon when hovering over an item. Click in the breadcrumbs bar to navigate back up the hierarchy. (There is an alternative way if you set “Hamburger menu 🡒 Settings 
 🡒 Preferences 🡒 Control 🡒 Use bullet point to zoom in”.)

    • Moving items in the hierarchy. Press “Tab” and “Shift + Tab” to move a list item down and up the hierarchy, respectively.

    • Moving items up and down. Grab a task with the mouse pointer at its bullet point and move it up and down the list, or inside other lists (if they are open).

  6. Create useful bookmarks. To make your work more efficient, it helps to bookmark searches that show you only a relevant subset of tasks. To create a bookmark, do a search in Dynalist and click the “:star:” icon next to the search box to bookmark the result. Then rename your bookmark in the bookmark pane on the left to something short and memorable.
      It is our best practice recommendation to create bookmarks for the following searched (supplying your Dynalist handle for username). For most users, these searches are already prepared under “Edgeryders Tasks 🡒 Bookmarks”. So you can just click the hyperlinks there to execute the search, and optionally bookmark it afterwards.

    • #username -is:completed: your open tasks
    • #username -is:completed has:date: your open tasks with a deadline (overdue or not)
    • #username -is:completed until:today: your open tasks with an overdue deadline
    • #username -is:completed within:2w: your open tasks with a deadline due in the next two weeks
    • #username edited:24h: your tasks created or changed in the last day
    • #username edited:24h -is:completed: your open tasks created or changed in the last day
    • #username edited:7d: your tasks created or changed in the last week
    • #username edited:7d -is:completed: your open tasks created or changed in the last week

3. Creating tasks

  1. Write the task. Place a one-sentence description that is “written like a command” in the appropriate place of the exiting “project 🡒 task status 🡒 task” hierarchy in the Edgeryders Tasks dynalist. The appropriate “task status” section depends on the task’s priority, and the appropriate position inside this section depends on (roughly) what time of execution you think is appropriate for the task.

  2. Add more information. As needed by your task, and according to our conventions as follows. (Here, username always refers to edgeryders.eu usernames.)

    • Markdown. You can use markdown formatting to add hyperlinks, bold and italic text, images etc. to tasks. It’s the same markup language used in the edgeryders.eu Discourse platform – see our documentation.
    • Assignee. Place #username at the end of a task. It assigns all sub-tasks as well, except for sub-tasks where any assignee is added to explicitly.
    • Mentions. Write @username to refer to a user. It’s like @mentions in Discourse, but without notifications (yet). Do not use this to assign tasks!
    • Deadline. Write !(yyyy-mm-dd) at the very beginning of a task, for example !(2017-12-31). It will show a nice date chooser when writing. By our convention, the deadline is 24:00 of that day.
    • Task author. Write #by-username in the task’s note, or otherwise at the end of the task, to indicate who created and assigned the task. Helps if questions remain with the task, and also lets you see all tasks you created by clicking the #by-yourname tag. Can be integrated in a sentence, such as “Added #by-matthias .” (use that space before the dot, since you don’t want to make the dot part of the tag).
      When it’s obvious who created the task (e.g. because the assignee is your only collaborator in a project), or just unimportant (e.g. because the task is trivially clear), simply omit this.
    • Important tasks. Write #important at the beginning of the task to mark the ≀7 most important current tasks for each assignee. Means, do not overuse this or #important will lose its meaning.
    • Blocked tasks. Write #blocked at the beginning of a task, and explain the reason why the task can’t proceed in the note section of the task (press “Shift + Return” while in the task to get there). If possible, add a link to the task this one depends on (enter [[ to create a link to another Dynalist item).
    • Permanent tasks. If the task is repeating, write #permanent at the beginning of the task. It allows to find all, or all own, permanent tasks using a search.
    • Tasks you are not sure about. If it is not at all clear whether a task is a good idea, makes sense or we will have the resources to execute it, write #perhaps at the beginning of the task.
    • Shopping list tasks. In some circumstances, like our OpenVillage Houses, it is useful to see all shopping / “city errand” tasks at once, across projects and sub-tasks. Use the #shopping tag at the end of such tasks to provide that.
    • Non-task sub-items. Sometimes, you want to create list items below your task that are not tasks themselves, so fall out of the “task 🡒 sub-tasks 🡒 sub-sub-tasks” etc. hierarchy. For example, a list of links from previous research to inform the execution of a task. For these cases, write a title in one sub-item and format it in italics (such as “Helpful links”), put it as the start of the sub-item list, and put your non-task items below that.

  3. Tell the assignee. By default, Dynalist creates no notifications at all about task assignments or @mentions (however see section 4). So after assigning an important task, tell the assignee via the appropriate channel: use a one-on-one Matrix chat as notifications are typically only relevant for that one user, or use a relevant Discourse topic when you created a major amount of tasks for a project and multiple people need to know. Include the direct link to the Dynalist task(s), which you can get from the URL bar after zooming in on the task, or from the context menu under “Get link”.

4. Get notifications about new tasks

We (more precisely, @anu) extended Dynalist to provide automatic e-mail notifications when you are assigned to a new task or mentioned in a task, using our #username and @username conventions as documented above.

This functionality is provided by a little software Dynalist Companion, which we installed on tasks.edgeryders.eu. It uses the Dynalist API to fetch the content of a single Dynalist document from their server every 20 minutes, detects changes, and sends notification e-mails accordingly. In our installation, it monitors the Edgeryders Tasks dynalist, and nothing else.

How to use it:

  1. Sign up on the signup page:

    • username: Use your edgeryders.eu username as your tasks.edgeryders.eu username. Because that’s how we mention you in Dynalist, and how this tool detects when to notify you by e-mail.
    • email: The e-mail address to receive notification e-mails. It does not have to be the same as that of your Dynalist or edgeryders.eu accout.
    • password: Password can be chosen as you want.
    • secret code: Take it the top of the Edgeryders Tasks dynalist. This mechanism allows signup for everyone who has access to that dynalist document, while preventing it for the general public.

  2. Wait until somebody tags your username in the Edgeryders Tasks dynalist, either as #username for a task assignment or @username for a mention. You can also do it yourself as a test.

  3. Check your e-mails. At most 20 minutes after that, you’ll receive an e-mail to the address of your Dynalist Companion account, notifying you of the new task assignment or mention.

You don’t need any features beyond creating an account and waiting for e-mails, and these other features are probably not functional yet anyway. There might be other issues as well, as this is early-stage software. If you find any, please let us know by creating an issue report in our issue tracker on Github.

5. Working on tasks

  1. Find the next task to work on. In each project, tasks are roughly ordered in the necessary order of execution. So usually, you choose the first result from the task lists you find below. But it’s a rough order only – you can adjust what you do at what time, as long as you prioritize #important tasks and observe deadlines.

    1. Filter to see your tasks with deadlines. Use the “My Edgeryders deadlines” bookmark (see above), or the equivalent search: #username within:2w. If you have other Dynalist task lists besides Edgeryders Tasks, press Ctrl+Enter to search globally across all documents. If nothing relevant is in that list:

    2. Filter to see all your tasks. Use the “My Edgeryders tasks” bookmark (see above), or the equivalent search: #username. Same note about searching globally applies. If nothing relevant is in that list either:

    3. Look at all tasks in your projects. Visit the list items belonging to the projects you work on, and go through their task lists top-to-bottom. You may find a task past its deadline that you can help to finish off (even though it is assigned to somebody else), or a task that is unassigned and that you can take over.

  2. Finish the task and mark it as applicable.

    1. Mark as discarded (if applicable). If you did not actually do the task but it became unnecessary or was dropped for some reason, add the #discarded tag to the beginning of the task to inform others looking at this in the future.

    2. Check it off. Both for discarded and normally completed tasks. Choose “context menu 🡒 Check off”, or press Ctrl+Enter, or if available check the task’s checkbox. It all marks the task as done, showing it with a strikethrough line from then on.

  3. Move the task to “Done”. Except if your task is a sub-task, move it to the end of the project’s “Done” list in order to not clutter the other lists. No worry if you forget it – somebody else will do it. Don’t do it for sub-tasks though – these should be kept below their parent tasks to preserve context.

6. Managing a project

We are trying to use Dynalist for agile management of whole projects as well. Proposed procedure for that:

  1. Create a project. This comes in two versions:

    • Normal project. For a project that is ok to share with all current Edgeryders collaborators (not with the public though), simply create a new top-level item in the Edgeryders Tasks dynalist, named after the project. Edgeryders collaborators are all people on the project teams of active projects we manage in Dynalist.

    • Sensitive project. For a project where task content should not (or not yet) be visible to all Edgeryders collaborators, or where you want to be extra sure that nobody outside of the project team accidentally changes or deletes information in Dynalist. In this case, create a new Dynalist document in the file pane (which you find from the left-top icon), right-click the document, choose “Manage sharing
” and invite your project team members. Also invite all Edgeryders directors with using their Dynalist e-mail addresses (as listed in Edgeryders Tasks at the top), in order to keep all company information available to all directors.

  2. Create sections. The items immediately below a project are meant to group tasks by status / priority or other useful criteria. Our standard sections are “Done”, “Current”, “Later”. But they can vary by project, for example naming them after project phase / milestone. Or if a project consists of only independent individual work, it may make sense to name sections by team members.

  3. Create a project plan with tasks. Add tasks with deadlines and assignees (where possible) to the sections for all major tasks of the project. That makes up the project plan. Perhaps introduce a tag for these, which will allow to view all the important tasks together (and hiding the rest) by clicking the tag.

  4. Refine the project plan with sub-tasks. You can have tasks on as many levels as you want in Dynalist, so gradually refining tasks in sub-tasks is a natural thing to do as the project unfolds. This is part of “agile” project management. Don’t try a “full upfront task decomposition”, because that never works and has to be re-done many times as the project unfolds. (It’s really the opposite of agile project management.)

7. Dynalist tips and tricks

  • View filters. In the desktop version, the top right contains an eye icon, bringing up a menu that lets you toggle different view modes for completed items and notes. In the mobile version, these options are also available, but from the top-right three dots menu as “Toggle checked item” and “Toggle notes”. Clicking them cycles through the 3 resp. 4 view options as seen in the desktop version.

  • Search operators. See the reference for Dynalist search operators. In addition to the reference, there are some more:

    • Giving the date format in hours (1h, 24h, -24h).
    • Giving the date format in decimal fractions of hours (1.5h, 0.01h). Since there is no way to give the date format in minutes or seconds, decimal fractions of hours helps to find content edited very recently (“edited:0.33h”).
    • Giving the date format with the now keyword (until:now for all overdue items resp. since:now for all items with deadlines in the future).
    • There is a bug with the “day” date range: specifying edited:1d will show everything edited 0-48 hours in the past, and specifying edited:0d will show everything edited 0-24 hours in the past. To keep it less unconfusing until the bug is fixed, you can use edited:24h instead.

  • Keyboard shortcuts. Go to “☰ 🡒 Shortcuts & Formatting” (or press Ctrl+?) to find an overview of available shortcuts. In addition, the following undocumented shortcuts are available:

    • Ctrl+A: select everything, but in multiple steps up the item hierarchy: (1) current item’s characters, (2) current item, (3) add all sibling items, (4) add parent item, (5) add all sibling items, (6) add parent item, and so on.

  • Wider main content. By default, Dynalist’s content is center aligned with large margins, which formats text into long columns. This can be avoided with a change in the Dynalist settings panel under “☰ 🡒 Settings 
 🡒 Preferences 🡒 Appearance” by un-checking the “Narrow document layout” option.

  • Keeping URLs from changing. Due to a bug in Dynalist, the URL for linking to a list item changes when you move it around with cut & paste. So when moving things inside the same document that are or might be linked from other websites, rather use drag & drop, the Ctrl+🠙 and Ctrl+🠛 shortcuts or “Move to 
” from the context menu.

  • Creating unchangeable URLs. If you want to link to a Dynalist task and really want to make sure that the link stays valid, the above tip of keeping links from changing is still a bit fragile mechanism as anyone cut & pasting the task to a different position would invalidate its previous URL. Instead, you can insert a tag that is only used once (we propose the scheme #id-shortword) and then link to a Dynalist search for that tag (example). You can even link to a global search for that tag (example), which will work even when the item is moved to another document, but also will present search results in a less consistent manner.

  • Drag & drop into closed items. It is not possible to drag & drop an item directly to be a child of a closed parent item. Instead, the most comfortable solution seems to be to move it immediately below that closed parent item, drop it, and then to press Tab to make it into a child item. This also works with multiple selected items at once.

  • Better scrolling during drag & drop. Usually, you would scroll by moving the grabbed item against the upper or lower edge of the list’s visible area. That is slow, imprecise and annoying. Instead, (1) click-and-hold to grab an item, (2) do not move the mouse the mouse pointer by even one pixel (due to a bug 
), (3) use the mouse wheel, or two-finger-scrolling on the touchpad, to scroll to the target position, (4) move the mouse pointer to the exact target and drop the item. This works with one or multiple selected items at once.

  • Formulas and symbols. By putting LaTeX notation between $$
$$, you can create inline formulas. See the formula notation reference. Formula notation is rendered to HTML using the open source KaTeX library, a product of Khan Academy.

  • Avoiding accidental changes in the mobile version. When viewing Dynalist on a mobile device, the top toolbar will contain a light gray lock icon. Click it and it will turn blue, indicating you are in “view mode” now. Click it again and it will turn gray again, indicating “edit mode”. In view mode, none of your changes will bring up the on-screen keyboard, making Dynalist much lessof a hassle to use on a touchscreen device.

  • Useful Unicode characters. Some Unicode symbols will render emoji-style as colorful icons. This is a behavior of modern browsers, including Forefox and Chromium, and is not a feature of Dynalist per se. But it works in Dynalist, including in the document titles shown in the sidebar – which makes this a great tool to highlight or visually tag some documents in the sidebar. Which emojis render as symbols and which as black-and-white characters differs between browsers and browser versions, so it is somewhat a matter of trial and error. For Firefox, a comfortable way to pick the right symbol is to install the Awesome Emoji Picker extension.

  • More tips and tricks. You find them in the Dynalist Help.

8. Adapting the Dynalist appearance

There are ways to adapt (“improve”) the visual appearance of Dynalist on your own computer or mobile device. @anu has created a stylesheet that is aligned to the formatting you’re used to from this edgeryders.eu website, especially regarding hyperlink highlighting, @mentions and tag references. So we propose you install it (and, if you want, tweak it more to your liking afterwards). Here’s the process:

  1. Download and install Stylus. It is a browser extension that is available for Chrome here in the Chrome webstore, and for Firefox here in the Firefox addons repository. You can ask @anu for help if you have a hard time with the installation. If you want to do this on a mobile device, it will only work with Firefox because Chrome for Android does not support apps and extensions (says Google).

    (There was also the original extension “Stylish” that performed the same functions, but was removed because it logged user web histories. “Stylus”, instead, is fully open source, uses no tracking or analytics, and has better performance.)

  2. Visit the page of the Edgeryders Dynalist style in the Stylish extension’s library. This works whether you installed Stylus or Stylish, regardless.

  3. Click the “Install Style” button, which will look like this

    If you are trying to install the stylesheet in Firefox for Android, check “☰ 🡒 Request Desktop Site” from the browser’s menu in order to see the right button. (A bug in the Stylus extension is causing this issue.)

  4. Reload your dynalist.io browser tab. This means, the tab where you have the Edgeryders Tasks document or another Dynalist document open currently. Afterwards, your dynalist should now look differently.

  5. Click on the extension’s icon (a stylized “S”) in the top right of your browser tab, then click on the icon of the “Edgeryders Dynalist” stylesheet, which should be visible in the first line.

  6. Edit your stylesheet. An editor will open in a new tab. Make all the edits you want, and click the “Save” button in the left sidebar to apply them immediately. When editing, be sure to activate the parts that can highlight your own tasks and mentions (very useful!). Simply replace username with your Edgeryders username in the three places where it appears, in the marked section of the stylesheet:

    • #username
    • #by-username
    • @username

  7. Adapt the font size. To make Dynalist look even more like Discourse, you can configure it with the same font and font size: on dynalist.io, from the top right navigate to “☰ 🡒 Settings
 🡒 Preferences 🡒 Font options” and set:

    • “Font size: Small”
    • “Font: Helvetica”

Some more details about this technique:

  • Code is on Github. See repository dynalist-edgeryders-local-css, created by @anu. Oh and, welcome to contribute there with your pull requests.

  • Tested in Chrome. The above instructions were tested with Chrome / Chromium only so far. The Stylish extension’s user interface could look differently in Firefox, but it should work the same way.

  • Also works with other userstyles extensions. There are various browser extensions available that allow you to change how websites look on your computer (so-called “CSS user stylesheets” feature). All of them should work with instructions similar to those above. If you use one of those, you can get the CSS code from our Github repository.

  • You can change much more. You can make Dynalist look the way you want it to – the stylesheet we provided is only an example. However, you will need to know or learn some CSS for that. You can look into the stylesheet we provided to find out how we adapted the appearance of tags, links etc. and start your own modifications from these examples.

Other tips to improve the Dynalist appearance:

  • Make emojis and symbols show as colored icons. This does not work out-of-the-box in Dynalist, unlike in Facebook, Discourse and so on. It may be working based on your browser, though: in recent Firefox, they show up as colored icons already. In Chrome they do not, but you can install an extension to achieve this: Chromoji. Use this page to test if and how it works in your browser.

    With color symbols and emojis, you can create new conventions of marking Dynalist list items in various ways that are intuitive, attention grabbing and visually appealing. You can use a site like Emojipedia to look up suitable symbols and emojis.

9. Keeping backups

Dynalist has no internal versioning, so any changes. This means also that accidental changes and deletions are final (if not immediately fixed with the “Undo” function) and that troll action in publicly editable dynalists are final. Good reasons to make regular backups. The Dynalist Pro plan includes daily backups to Google Drive and Dropbox, but you can also roll your own system.

Here is how our own Dynalist backup system works: [TODO]

10. Design rationale

  • One Dynalist document for the company’s projects. Having one Dynalist document per project would be nice, as it would allow to share it only with the project’s members (minimizing the risk of accidental change or deleting of Dynalist content by others). However, there is no global search in Dynalist yet, so this setup would make it impossible to show “all tasks assigned to me across all projects” at once.

  • Other Dynalist documents for community projects. Since we can’t have a “one document per project” setup (see above), we let all our 40+ collaborators access one document with all our company projects. In order to minimize the risks of deletion and accidental changes to the content, we will at least not allow even more people into the same main projects dynalist. Instead, we let them form community-managed projects when necessary. They would either not use a task management tool (the usual case in open source collaboration), do the little coordination they need right in Discourse, use an issue tracker (for software projects), or use a new Dynalist document. These are independently managed projects, so it’s not a concern for the Edgeryders company anyway.

  • Aggregate tasks by project, not by user. We could have used a “assignee 🡒 task status task” convention for our Dynalist hierarchy instead. It would allow users to see all their tasks in one place, and ordered by proposed execution order, without needing to do a search for #username like now. Project affiliation would be expressed with #project-{projectname} tags as on Discourse. However, it would break our tried-and-tested convention to aggregate organizational content by project (as practiced in the Discourse Workspaces categories). Dynalist would then be not much of a project management tool for us, just a multi-person task list.
      With the “project 🡒 task status 🡒 task” hierarchy, you can instead see the list of tasks that will lead a project from beginning to end. It also allows to assign tasks to multiple people using the #username tags, without copy&paste redundancy.

4 Likes
3

Thanks for doing this work, Matt, I am willing to try – in fact I have already created an account.

Do you have any suggestion as what convention should regulate our usage of Dynalist? Is it something we recommend to project managers? Or something we (the core) promise each other we will use? Are we supposed to check it regularly (burden of information on the assignee) or to tell each other we have put tasks out (burden of information on the assigner)?

1 Like
4

It should be our standard for task-based collaboration in projects. So:

  • important / long-running discussions → use Discourse
  • documentation → use Discourse
  • normal tasks → use Dynalist
  • instant discussions and decisions, ASAP tasks → use Matrix

The second one (see also “Creating Tasks → Tell the assignee” in the manual above). Ultimately there will be software integration with Discourse notifications. Until then, the assigner has to create these notifications.

In practice, we’ll only notify the assignee if she’d miss it otherwise. For example, I’ll not tell Anu about new far-future tasks, as she’s working along her dynalist every day.

6

Thanks @Matthias, I will also give it a try but starting later this month. Right now doing this will take too much of the actual task completion work that I have :frowning:

7

I was going to say the same. Experimentally, I created a task for Noemi on Dynalist, then I let her know as per the instructions. She complied or did not, but – as she is saying above – she did not mark the task as done. If she complied, we’ll never hear it again. If she did not, the person that wanted to be paid will complain.

In general, “burden on the taskmaker” for now means that the taskmaker now has two thing to do instead of one, and it is not clear what we get in return. Maybe if we keep at it we will become more productive as we embrace the to-do list philosophy. But I see it as a tough sell, Matt.

8

I’d say, give it a bit of time, Alberto. You’ll not see much benefit before you are assigned to ≄10 tasks in Dynalist at the same time, or have 10 open tasks there that you created. At that time, the tags, filtering, deadline search filter etc. in Dynalist will come in handy to keep track of the myriad of tasks 


An answer in some more detail is below.

I assume the two things are “(1) write the task into Dynalist” and “(2) tell the assignee”, instead of just the second before – right? Well yea, admitted. But it will be just the first thing in the future when we automate the notifications. I’m not saying this is the perfect tool already, but as the major requirement is “something without lots of form filling”, it’s as close as I could find.

But there’s already a lot of benefit you get in return. It’s not there when using Dynalist for sporadic tasks only, but when using it for lots of small tasks (as with Anu) and for project management (say, for OpenVillage Festival) it’s apparent:

  • “mental offloading” of tasks and ideas to the list: “drop and forget”, as I do for tasks for Anu that don’t need immediate execution / notification 
 they will be done at the right time
  • queries (based on search operators and our tags) to keep track of a multitude of tasks created for or by you, and what needs to be done next
  • a dedicated place for putting and finding task instructions (one topic per task, as back in Drupal times, was for sure a lot of clutter in the groups, so not a proper place)
  • a dedicated place for marking tasks as done, so whoever manages a project has a project plan that needs no (or less) maintenance to keep up to date
  • task refinement by splitting a task into sub-tasks, sub-sub-tasks etc.; that’s nice for agile project management where you start with milestone tasks and gradually refine them as the project progresses; we cannot do that comfortably with “one-post-per-topic” tasks as in Drupal, or with Trello-style tasks, or Github issues, or by just telling the assignee over Matrix / DM / e-mail / in person.

Getting everyone used to the new tool will be tough, but hopefully not more tough than introducing Matrix. For the next project I get to manage, I’ll certainly keep all tasks in Dynalist, all discussions in Discourse, and everything that is ok to forget in Matrix 


9

Oh, sure. You know me: rule abider. I’ll trod on like a good soldier, until we decide to drop it.

10

Now we have the feature for automatic notifications from Dynalist :slight_smile:

Dynalist-notify as name implies is a simple notification software to enable robust collaboration between team members, staffs, etc
 How it works: this software uses dynalist api to fetch the content from dynalist server. It runs every ten minutes using cron jobs and monitors changes between the periods.

Documentation about how to use it is now in the Dynalist Manual above (in section 4).

2 Likes
11

This is great thank you @anu.

Is it finished? If so, does this mean that if I tag myself as #anique.yael then it will notify me by email of the task allocation?

12

It works but we are still in initial state (test). I will cover in documentation very soon.

1 Like
13

@anique.yael You can register your account :slight_smile: It does send the notification, the development of it is continuous process but yes I would be happy if you test it and get feedback on it.

14

Well @anique.yael you can register but it won’t send notifications just yet. Need to fix some last issues with the setup of Anu’s software on our server. Give it 1-2 days 


1 Like
15

Awesome and no rush! Let me know when it’s ready

16

Thanks!
Trying to register too, but it asks for a Dynalist API - which one is it? Couldnt find it in our Dynalist manual


1 Like
17

Second @noemi. Additionally, there is a “user tag” field, which I guess means you had second thoughts about making the username identical to the user tag.

18

Hi all,
its ready to receive notification from dynalist.
lets register.

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That’s true 
 the software is now properly installed on the server, and you can register. I have put the shared secret that prevents public account registration (but allows account registration to those who have it) right into the top of the Edgeryders Tasks Dynalist file.

@Anu will have one issue to fix tomorrow before I will finally enable the sending of notification e-mails. So while you can register right now already, the software will start being useful to you only after that issue is fixed. (There are no other functions right now except these notification e-mails.)

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Ok people, Anu has fixed that last issue and the Dynalist Companion software now sends notifications every 20 minutes :slight_smile: Ready to test 
 I propose @alberto and @anique.yael give it a try and we roll it out to everyone else on Dynalist after collecting some initial experiences.

I have updated the manual above (section 4) with documentation how to sign up and how to use this little tool.

And let’s congratulate @anu to her first program for real-world use. That early it’s quite a feat for a novice programmer!

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Congrats @anu! Very well done.

I have signed up. Waiting for @anique.yael to confirm she has too, then we’ll test.

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Thank you so much :slight_smile: