Looong New Year resolutions
(closed account) says:
The BBC have a list of 100 books that are supposed to represent the "best-loved" novels in the UK. There's even a Facebook app where you can figure out how many of the books you have read and compare your results to your friends.
I've read a pathetically small percentage of these, so a good New Year resolution would be to read the lot, and what better way to keep track of the list than to use rtm. The challenge though, is to take the list of 100 books and import them into rtm without too much hassle.
First of all, the list itself is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml I saved this into a text file. Each line of the text file contains a single book, with a number and its author. Each line should be a separate task in rtm and I create a new list (Booklist) to hold them all. Using Linux, it's easy to then append to each line of the file the tags we want each task to be associated with. I wanted #Booklist and #listonly -- which is the tag I use to filter out "real", time-dependant tasks from lists of things like current projects, or random ideas. On the command line you can do something like this:
$ cat booklist.txt | sed 's/$/ #Booklist #listonly/' > booklist2.txt
which appends the tags to each line in the file and stores the new information in a file called "booklist2.txt". So, now my file contains lines that look like this:
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot #Booklist #listonly
Next, we want to import the whole lot into rtm in one go. In the Settings -> Info tab there are several email addresses you can use to import tasks via email, I used the "Import Email Address" which allows you to import a whole list of tasks at once. However, you can only import fifty tasks at a time. So, we need two emails, each with the subject "Booklist", which is the new list to import the tasks into, and containing 50 of the lines of text from the booklist2.txt file which we can just copy and paste.
Easy, huh? Nearly. I had a couple of hiccups with this. Firstly, I had a stray blank line or two in my original text file, which resulted in a couple of blank tasks. Those are easy to delete. Secondly, rtm is well-loved for having a very clever parsing algorithm to deal with human-readable deadline dates. That translated the example task above "20 Middlemarch - George Eliot #Booklist #listonly" into a task that was due some time in March! Impressive, but not quite what I had intended, so that needed resetting to "never" and some of the task text needed tidying up. Still, nearly fool-proof, and certainly quicker than using the web interface.
I've read a pathetically small percentage of these, so a good New Year resolution would be to read the lot, and what better way to keep track of the list than to use rtm. The challenge though, is to take the list of 100 books and import them into rtm without too much hassle.
First of all, the list itself is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml I saved this into a text file. Each line of the text file contains a single book, with a number and its author. Each line should be a separate task in rtm and I create a new list (Booklist) to hold them all. Using Linux, it's easy to then append to each line of the file the tags we want each task to be associated with. I wanted #Booklist and #listonly -- which is the tag I use to filter out "real", time-dependant tasks from lists of things like current projects, or random ideas. On the command line you can do something like this:
$ cat booklist.txt | sed 's/$/ #Booklist #listonly/' > booklist2.txt
which appends the tags to each line in the file and stores the new information in a file called "booklist2.txt". So, now my file contains lines that look like this:
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot #Booklist #listonly
Next, we want to import the whole lot into rtm in one go. In the Settings -> Info tab there are several email addresses you can use to import tasks via email, I used the "Import Email Address" which allows you to import a whole list of tasks at once. However, you can only import fifty tasks at a time. So, we need two emails, each with the subject "Booklist", which is the new list to import the tasks into, and containing 50 of the lines of text from the booklist2.txt file which we can just copy and paste.
Easy, huh? Nearly. I had a couple of hiccups with this. Firstly, I had a stray blank line or two in my original text file, which resulted in a couple of blank tasks. Those are easy to delete. Secondly, rtm is well-loved for having a very clever parsing algorithm to deal with human-readable deadline dates. That translated the example task above "20 Middlemarch - George Eliot #Booklist #listonly" into a task that was due some time in March! Impressive, but not quite what I had intended, so that needed resetting to "never" and some of the task text needed tidying up. Still, nearly fool-proof, and certainly quicker than using the web interface.
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