RescueTime Blog

Hey folks! We’ve been working hard on a lot of new features as of late. Here’s a sneak peek at something we’re testing in limited beta right now:

We’ll keep you posted from this blog on how to participate in our beta test for these new features. Happy RescueTiming!

[update 2010-03-03: We have pushed a new Beta version for the Mac (2.2.1.662) that should help capture more of the URLs from Google Chrome. If you want to give it a try, re-download and install the Mac beta (links below) and let us know if this reduces the amount of time seen for the generic "Chrome" time on your dashboard]

This has been a bad 2 weeks for Mac RescueTime users as both Firefox (with v3.6 for Mac) and Chrome (v5.x for the Mac) have effectively broken RescueTime’s ability to grab URL information from the browser. The result is lots of “Firefox” and “Chrome” time instead of time for individual web sites. Yuck. We have some fixes for you, detailed below. The team has worked tirelessly on this (12+ hours a day for some of them), so please give them a round of applause… This is one of the challenges of working on someone else’s platform.

Firefox 3.6 Mac Users (note: 3.5.x or earlier users don’t need to worry until they upgrade)

To get URL resolution with RescueTime, you will need to do the following:

• Download/Install the Beta RescueTime Data Collector
• Download/Install the RescueTIme Firefox Add On

We’re not thrilled that an add-on is required, but it’s currently the only workable solution that we have available for Mac FF3.6 users. Big props to the Linux crowd, who had built this add-on for the open source RescueTime for Linux project. Woot! Note: without the add on, RescueTime will not get data for individual web sites.

Chrome 5.x Mac Users (note: Chrome is pretty aggressive about upgrades, so you’ll be experiencing this problem if you are a Mac Chrome user pretty quickly)

To get URL resolution with RescueTime, you will need to do the following:

• Download/Install the Beta RescueTime Data Collector
• That’s it.

We’ll be pushing out an upgrade to our Mac Chrome users next week (likely) but you can get a jump start by using the instructions above.

Please let us know if follow the above instructions and have any problems.

Attention Mac RescueTime/Firefox users!

At RescueTime, we’re Mac folk too (well, most of us are). That’s why it was a huge disappointment to us that Mozilla decided to be the only browser in the OSX market to ship without the ability to pull the URL from the current tab (a feature that RescueTime relies on to break your time down by individual site). A lot of applications depend on this functionality– it’s no surprise that this bug is getting plenty of attention in Firefox’s public bug tracker. Want to help? Vote up the issue and help spread the word.

What this means in the short term

If you upgrade (or have upgraded) to Firefox 3.6 (on the Mac only), your browser time will be reported as “Firefox” time rather than broken down by site.

Short term (or long term) alternatives

To not lose this feature you can stick with FF 3.5 or you can change browsers to Chrome or Safari. The RescueTeam has all shifted to Chrome by necessity and we’re really loving it– it’s fast and reliable. Note: if you do switch to Chrome, use the release version and not the dev version.

What we’re doing moving forward

We have a (sub-optimal) workaround that we’re testing— we may release that if testing goes well. We’re investigating other options and are hopeful that Mozilla steps up here.

share team status, show off top performers, and more

We’ve had substantial user interest in ways of sharing and re-using their RescueTime data. True to our principles of keep-it-simple, we’ve published a way to very easily and safely share views of your data. These features have been live for over a month now, and some of you have already found and done great things with them– thank you! Here I’d thought I’d outline the process and some example use cases to help undertand how you can take your data further.

Although sharing common underlying code, there are two different paths to API data, with two different intentions: embedding charts and raw data access.

Path 1: Super Easy! Embed a Chart

As you use our new, improved, faster, more flexible reports browser, when you come across a slicing and dicing you particularly like, just click the Embed button, found right under the chart. Grab the snippet, and stick it in your blog, or your intranet, or wherever you want to publish it. Note that you can put as many as you like on the same page. Some of our clients have built team dashboards on their corporate intranets where anyone can go to see the pulse of the organization. Some publish these on their websites to show off their performance. Some live blog examples include: www.tonywright.com, Chris Barrow’s Blog, TheG2.net Blog and node.to.

Behind the scenes, this sets up an access key for you and sets privileges on it: when you paste this snippet onto your blog or intranet, anyone trying to steal your info using this key can only get exactly what it already shows. Note that in the snippet you can tweak certain aspects of the chart.

Also note that while your report view in your browser is fixed to the date you are looking at it, your embedded chart will continue to update with whatever is current. The timeframe is saved– as in “a week” or “a day” but not the specific date.

Path 2: Get Funky With Your Data

We’ve released an API targeted a making it easier for users to obtain alternate perspectives on their data, or to re-use it in other applications in a programmatic way. The current interface offered is based around a read-only http query core that models your data in ways users are accustomed to from RescueTime’s existing report views. We’re working on some language-specific convenience wrappers around this query API, and the Python library is complete. Ruby, Java, and Javascript are in the plans.

The first step is to go to the “Embeds & Data API” link from the bottom of your logged in session. From there you can “Setup Data API” to create a key for raw data access. Instead of output being formatted for charts, instead you pick JSON or CSV output, which you can then parse and reformat however you please. You can also parameterize your requests to change what is returned, without needing new keys– you can change date, search key words, specific application names, among other things.

There is a security model around the key providing data scope control and access safety, based on the same key system used by embedding. In this case, a switch is flipped that allows parameterization– so it removes that “can only see what browse view saw” restriction that embed has. It is assumed you will keep these more privileged keys private. But you can always monitor traffic and disable a key if you believe someone is using it who shouldn’t be. You can also set basic network restrictions around the key, to lock it down to access for just your machines.

A Reference Implementation

You can see what we did with the API in our reference implementation hosted on Google’s Appengine. It uses all the aboved methods and API tools in one page. All of the code for it is available for download.

Just a quick newsflash for those keeping score at home.  Individual users of RescueTime may have their score look very different as of this release.  The reason for this that previously, you probably had much of your data untagged and unscored.  Also, RescueTime didn’t do a fabulous job of making sure all of the many sites people visit every day had categories and scores– so these didn’t really effect your scores.  So what’s likely happening is that lots of “surfing” time (which was previously not effecting your efficiency because RescueTime wasn’t smart enough to assign it a default score) was not hurting your score.

All that being said, assigning default scores is HARD– everyone is different.  For me, email is a sorta-productive necessary evil and IM is the devil.  You might work differently.  While we’ve done the best we can with default scores/categories, you should feel free to override them based on your workstyle.

Quickest way to do this is:

Go to the new Manage Categories Settings Page.  Here you’ll see a bunch of boxes that look like this:

You can mouse over each of the categories to see an edit button, where you can change the default score (-2 is bad, +2 is good) to better fit your style.

If you find that a lot of your time is uncategorized, you can go to the list of all uncategorized activities and spend a minute or two categorizing the big ones.

And, finally, you can check out your top activities in a list ranked by how much time you spent on them.  It’s a good idea to glance down this list to see if the scores are appropriate.  As with all things, don’t go crazy here– once you find yourself scoring sites that you visited for only a few minutes in the month, it’s probably time to say, “good enough!”.

The exciting thing about the new release is that everyone’s scores and categories contribute to everyone else– so as people categorize and score sites, that means you’ll get democratic “defaults” and won’t have to spend time monkeying with your data in RescueTime (making us all more productive!).