As you may know, we had a feature poll for what we should work on in December.  But with the holiday and other year-end excitement, we didn’t actually work on any new features for RallyClock last month.  However, we did find an interesting result from our poll, we have a two-way tie for first:

• Better Graphing and Time Reporting Tools
• Set a Time Budget (monthly, total time) for a Project

So we will work on both of these this month.  The time budget is a bit simpler, so it will likely be rolled out first.  Thanks for all your feedback!

We bought the bullet and ordered a nifty new server for RallyClock. It is a Dell SC1435, with two (2) dual-core AMD 64bit Opterons, 4GB of RAM and 250GB RAID-1 drives. For the OS, we decided to go with Debian - our new choice for production environments (RallyClock is currently running on Gentoo). I forgot to saved a bit of money and didn’t order a CD drive, but using a USB jump drive and installing over the network was a snap.

Also, instead of running from the Vermonster development lab, we will be moving RallyClock to our co-location center at One Summer Street. Here it can bump shoulders with the likes of AboveNet, AT&T, Broadwing, Cogent, Comcast, Level3, MCI, Qwest, RCN, SBC, Verio, Verizon, Veroxity, and XO. We will be running secure daily data backups to a server here at Vermonster HQ.

We should have everything up an running next week. We will keep everyone posted, as we expect a bit of downtime one evening.

We are rolling out a set of features this week including a nice weekly view with printable timesheet. But for our next feature, we decided to give PollDaddy.com a try so we can ask you, the users, what feature you’d like to see.

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We just pushed out a new update for RallyClock. There are two great changes that you may notice and enjoy. One is a much improved user interface for managing your timers. The second is the ability to specify if a project’s entries have required descriptions.

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If you are a developer, you probably keep track of your source control commit messages for time tracking purposes. Well if you are using SVN (Subversion) for your source control, here is one nifty way to keep RallyClock informed about what you are doing by appending your commit messages right on to your active RallyClock timer as notes.

Here we will show you how to do this easily using a little Perl code we cooked up and RallyClock’s API. This article goes through it step-by-step.

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We are all big fans of usability and are in a constant effort to make our applications more fun and more easy to use. A key part of RallyClock is the IM bot, or the daemon (i.e. process that keeps running) we wrote to process your messages and then send you back a reply.

One thing we did notice in our development and usage efforts is there is sometimes a bit of a lag over the Jabber network from when you send the initial message, we process it, and then send back a return. Instead of keeping you hanging, we decided to use the already-present IM typing notification feature found in most IM clients.

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There is a new section to the website, the FAQs.  We summarized some questions about how to setup and use RallyClock on this page.  All the articles are links to the help support forum, so users are encouraged to leave feedback.

A big thank you to everyone who’s signed up to try out RallyClock! We really appreciate it. As I’ve mentioned to a few folks already, we’ve been using it internally for a few months and it’s really improved our time tracking process. Hopefully it will do the same for you.

Please let us know what you like, what you don’t, and what could use some extra polishing.

Thanks again!

We are proud to announce that we are the official sponsor of Jobs.Rubynow.com. The job site, run by two former Vermonster team members, is the de-facto website for ruby jobs. We feel this sponsorship exposes RallyClock to a key audience of contractors and employers where time account it critical to their business.

We are really delighted to support the site and their efforts!

Welcome to the RallyClock Developers’ Blog. We just launched it, so it is a bit content-lean right now.

Over the next week or so we plan on posting a few interesting articles; we have some great articles about our product, how we are using IM (instant messenger) technology and our experiences using Rails.

In addition to this blog, we also launched RallyClock Forums to handle support for the application and our API, as well as post announcements.

Enjoy and thanks for visiting!