Episode: 1899
Title: HPR1899: MyTinyTodo List
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1899/hpr1899.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:57:12

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This is HPR Episode 1899 entitled My Tiny To Do List.
It is hosted by John Colp and in about 13 minutes long.
The summary is introduction to one of my favorite productivity tools that web-based
to do list called My Tiny To Do.
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Hey everybody, this is John Colp and Lafayette Louisiana, recording another episode of
Hacker Public Radio.
Today I'm going to talk about one of my favorite productivity tools and that is My Tiny To Do.
It's a web-based to-do list that I've used for two or three years now.
I don't remember exactly how long it had been using it.
At one point I felt like I needed to find some kind of to-do list that was cross-platform
and that would sync up my to-do with all my different devices and everything.
What I found instead of any kind of central service that would require clients and all
my devices that would sync up with the server, I just found this web-based thing where
I just use a web browser to log in to my to-do list.
I will have a link to the My Tiny To Do site.
I think it's called My Tiny To Do because it's a very, very lightweight service.
It's a few PHP scripts and that you can use either MySQL database or SQLite.
I use SQLite on my server and it has always worked perfectly.
You can do some pretty cool things with it.
You can have multiple lists.
They show up in your interface as a bunch of separate tabs.
You can add pretty much as many as you want.
I have right now I think about 10 or a dozen different tabs for all the kinds of things
I want to keep lists of.
I don't use this just for things I have to do.
I use it also for things I want to remember, like lists of books I want to read or lists
of movies I want to watch and stuff like that.
I don't know if you're like me.
I will think of a movie that I want to see.
But I'll think of it in some random place where I can't write it down or do anything about
it and then later when I'm actually in a position to watch something, I don't remember
what it was.
Now whenever I think of something like that, I just get out my phone and add it to my
Tiny To Do list on the movies and books tab.
I also like to keep a list of ideas that I have of gifts to give to my family at holidays
and birthdays and stuff like that.
What else?
Projects that I'm working on usually get their own list on my Tiny To Do thing and so
things that I need to do on the various projects like my counterpoint books or the School
of Music website or things like that, I'll keep a list of stuff to do there.
And I've also got a tab that is the right away tab that's like stuff I have to get done
as soon as possible.
So anyway, you can have multiple tabs like that.
You can search through the notes, although I haven't really done that very much.
I usually know where the items are going to be based on what kind of thing it is.
I'll just click on the right tab and see the list.
You can either view tab lists individually or you can view all the to-do tasks that you
have in your entire database at once and that's probably the best way to go about searching
through them.
You can add tags to them as well.
This is also something I haven't really done very much.
But it says on the My Tiny To Do website, it says that you can generate tag clouds if
you've been tagging everything.
So that might be something that you like.
You can prioritize notes.
You can, what else can you can sort them in different orders.
What else?
There's all list of things you can do and I'm going to actually put a bunch of bullet
points in the show notes as far as the features as well.
What prompted me to do this show was because I set up a separate instance of the to-do list
because I mentioned in a previous episode that I'm going to be taking on new duties starting
in the spring semester.
I'm going to be the director of the School of Music and as such, I'm probably going
to have a whole lot more stuff to keep track of and so I've set up a separate My Tiny
To Do instance for use at work.
What I don't want to do is try to manage things the way my current boss is doing.
He's a great boss.
He does a great job, but his method of doing this is simply to have this staggering array
of sticky notes all over his desk.
Sometimes lined up in little strips of them and then sometimes in a little circle, it's
crazy how many sticky notes this guy has everywhere and I don't think I can do it that way.
So I'm going to have a separate to-do list instance to manage all my work related stuff.
The first thing I tried to do was just to kind of transfer over my home to-do list instance
over to my work server and just rename it and wait while the car goes by there, I'm sitting
out in my car port to get some nature sounds if possible.
So I tried to just kind of transfer all the files over, change a couple of values in
the setup, the configuration files and it didn't really work.
This failed and the reason I wanted simply to transfer it over there instead of just
downloading a new copy of the code was because I've done a number of hacks to the styling.
They claim on the website that this is mobile friendly, but I found that I didn't really
like the way in which it was mobile friendly.
You had to add something to the end of the URL to get the mobile site and I want to
have always like the same URL no matter what device I'm logging in on.
And also it just didn't look that good and so what I did was went into all of the appropriate
files and changed it such that it's now a responsive design that checks the width of
the device that you're accessing it with and then adjust the styling accordingly.
If it detects that you're on a phone or you know something like I don't know 480 pixels
or narrower then it will kick in a whole different list of styling rules for the buttons
to make them a little bit wider so your fingers can tap them easier and stuff like that.
Anyway, so it's responsive design now and so I wanted to keep all my styling changes
and I couldn't remember where they were so I thought that the easiest thing to do was
just dump everything.
But since it didn't work I went ahead and downloaded a new copy of the code anyway and
then the way I transferred my styling changes was to just to transfer the themes folder
from my old instance over to the new one and I probably should have done that to begin
with.
Anyway, set up is super easy.
I'm assuming that you're going to try this that you have a server you can use and it's
got a couple of the basic dependencies.
It doesn't require much.
It needs PHP 5-sqlite so that's if you're going to use sqlite you could use a big heavy
database like my sql or MariaDB I guess is the new version of that.
I've always used sqlite because it's super, super lightweight so you need PHP and there's
some other PHP module that you need that the website lists and I'm not sure if you need
PHP, FPM or not but I have it.
The work server that I was putting this on did not have even PHP on it.
I was just using engine X for just straight up storage files on a web server for me to access.
So I had to install PHP 5 and also the PHP 5-sqlite module and one tip about this.
If you're using engine X like I am and then you try to install PHP it is also going to
try to install Apache and a bunch of Apache packages also.
If you want to avoid that, I read online somewhere that you can change the order in which
you list the things that you want to install so if for example you put PHP 5-FPM and
then PHP 5 in that order then it would just install those and not try to install the Apache
web server and all those extra packages too.
So anyway I got the dependencies in place and I moved the code over, actually installed
a new version of the code, stuck it in the right place on the server and then all you
have to do to set it up is navigate to it in a web browser and go to like the URL for
the instance slash setup.php and it will run a setup script that essentially just has
one button that asks you which kind of server you're going to use or database you're going
to use whether it's SQLite or MySQL and you select one, click install and then it says
you're ready to go.
And so from there you can just navigate to the URL for your to do list instance and start
making lists.
Now one thing you might want to do is set up password protection and you do that by
going into one of the configuration files.
I think it is inside the root directory of the web app go to the db folder and then it's
I want to say it's config.php or something, you'll find it but you can go in there and
supply a password and then in order to access your to do list you have to go through with
the password and so that's one way to protect it from other people.
Anyway, that's about it I suppose it's a great little web app if you like hosting your
own instances of things and using open source tools and I highly recommend you try it.
I like it, I use it every day all the time, I've used it almost every day for the last
two or three years and I don't know, I guess I could do without it and use other things.
I think our collaboration suite at work, Zimbra has a pretty decent task manager thing
but I really like my tiny to do list so that's what I use.
Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed that.
This has been John Culpin, Latvia at Louisiana on the $2 microphone with my phone, recording
using the high Q MP3 app and recording straight to AUG this time instead of 2 MP3 we will
see how it sounds, bye y'all.
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