kevin1's dashboard

The different "types" of items are Appointment, Bookmark, Contact, List and Note. "todo" is not a type. Any item can be made into a "todo" by adding the "todo" tag. An appointment tagged as "todo" is both an appointment and a todo.

Types have both positive and negative aspects. They're good because it lets us search by type, organize by type, and because different types are treated differently (some have the URL field, some have more). They're a problem mostly because it's not possible to change an item of one type to another type. Like from a "bookmark" to a "contact", or from an "appointment" to a "note". Once the type is set and the item is created, it's impossible to change it.

Once the item is created, the type cannot be changed. This makes the times when Sandy makes an error all the more difficult. If Sandy makes a mistake and interprets something wrong. the only way to fix it, the only way to change the type of an item, is to create a new item and delete the old one.

To create an item of a specific type, you have to be careful. There is no command to tell Sandy to create a "contact", or a "note", etc. so it takes some practice and guesswork or investigation in order to have Sandy create an item of the type you want.

No, there is no way to specify what type of item is created. It's possible to create the type you want, but there's no way to specify it. You have to know a bit more about how Sandy works in order to do this correctly.

Enter an item with a date and you'll most likely get an appointment. Unless you include "contact information" like a phone number.

Enter an item without a date or "contact information". Then you'll get a note. In order to get a note with "contact information" in the "more context" section, you have to use a trick like putting all the contact type information in quotes.

> remember to pickup the drycleaning "999-555-1234 corner of 4th and main, etc." @todo

Lists are currently pretty easy to specify. They have an asterisk on the following line. (There is talk of updating how lists can be created.)

> remind me about groceries on Friday at 2 @todo
> * carrots
> * butter
> * salt

See http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy... and http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy... – kevin1, on July 17, 2008 23:26

I heard that they're actively working on this. From what I understand, there are two parts to this. 1) enabling Sandy to use one line to create and update a list, and 2) enabling Sandy to recognize a few keywords.

For example, on Twitter, you should be able to create and update a list by putting multiple asterisks on the same line. For Jott, Sandy should recognize a few keywords instead of the asterisks. ("add", "remove", "and", etc.)

Something like this for Twitter
> d s r list groceries * butter * eggs * milk
> d s u #1 * yogurt -* milk

For Jott
> remember groceries list. add butter and eggs and milk

There is also some talk about having Sandy recognize list names such as "Groceries" or "Trader Joes". This would allow you to update a list without looking it up first.

> update #trader joe's list. add case of 2 buck chuck for the party

The FAQ I made is here http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy... – kevin1, on July 17, 2008 22:49

GetSatisfaction is wonderful, but it still has its weaknesses. It's just too hard to quickly find the best answer to a question. Although having the search box list the tags "Solved" and "Answered" is extremely helpful.

There's a lot of good information in the threads. The problem is that it's too hard to find what you're looking for. To find the best answer, you have to hope that some nice person tagged a reply as "answers the question". Otherwise, you're going to be doing a lot of reading. Multiple threads have to be read to find the gems.

The search doesn't do enough. As far as I know, the search feature only works to find a thread topic. Only the text of the post creating the thread is part of this search. There is no way to search through the individual replies in a thread. Or, if there is, it's hidden somewhere. I can't find it.

To find the post with the best information, I can't necessarily search for a keyword about the information that I'm looking for. Instead, I have to search for a keyword in the text of the topic that the post happened to be in reply to. Oftentimes the best answer to a question is found in a thread that seems minimally related. For example, the best information on how calendar feeds work could be found in a thread that doesn't even contain the word "calendar". For example: "I can't get Sandy to Work with Outlook!".

I continually find myself wanting to refer to a particular reply that I saw a short while ago. The problem is that I have to remember what the topic was of the thread the reply was in, or I'll never be able to find it again.

I think a FAQ is a great idea.

It'd make it a lot easier to point people to the right information. An edited list, containing only the best information, updated by volunteers. Making it easy to find the most common questions and the most reliable answers.

I like the idea so much, I even tried to make a FAQ myself. The topic was "using lists in Sandy". It turns out that making a FAQ is a little hard to do on GetSatisfaction. It doesn't have the Question - Answer format, and I can't update the answers later as things change and Sandy is updated. At least, I can't do this now. Maybe GetSatisfaction will make something in the future.

Are we going to be able to use the alternate URLs? That would make it really easy. http://iwantsandy.com/bookmarks.rss or http://iwantsandy.com/bookmarks/list.rss

I'm not sure what "RSS for any query" entails, whether the RSS feeds are going to change or become better. The problem right now seems to be that the URL gets really complicated. I do know that it's already possible to get an RSS feed for bookmarks. The link http://iwantsandy.com/list.rss?type=b... works right now. Some extensive iCalendar queries work too. Like http://www.iwantsandy.com/_secret_cod...

It's interesting that we don't need to use a "private" RSS feed like we need to for iCalendar files.

This is the way it's supposed to work.

Todo is a special tag that can be added and removed at any time. The actual "type" of an item cannot be changed. It's one of "Appointment", "Bookmark", "Contact", "List" or "Note". You can have an Appointment tagged as a "todo" and you can have a Bookmark tagged as "todo", etc. In this case the item is supposed to show up in both the Appointment list and in the "todo" list, because it is both. It's an Appointment and it's a todo.

I'm assuming that you have created some items without a date and tagged them as "todo". Because the items don't have a date, they were created as a "Note", not as an "Appointment". Because the item is also tagged as "todo" it will show up in both the Note list and the todo list.

Note that there is a mistake in the guide.(http://iwantsandy.com/help/guide#_nor... ) It should say "I'll skip the reply even if you have email replies turned ON". – kevin1, on July 17, 2008 19:17

There isn't any problem with using @ tags over Twitter.

What happened here is that the "noreply" tag didn't do what you expected. Don't feel bad though, I was thoroughly confused too. So I went and did some investigation on what the "noreply" tag is supposed to do. (http://iwantsandy.com/help/guide#_nor... )

As far as I understand it, the "noreply" tag only applies to replies by *email*. Not to communications over Jott or Twitter. Although the name "noreply" certainly is confusing. The "noreply" turns off the automatic email reply. http://iwantsandy.com/settings/email Sandy doesn't have a setting or a tag to turn off replies to Jott or Twitter. (You can modify the Jott Link at the Jott website to turn off all SMS replies from Sandy to Jott.)

Just to be absolutely sure, can you check the Twitter communication that Sandy received? You can do this either through http://iwantsandy.com/email or by clicking on the new event and then clicking on the "More context" link. This will display the message that Sandy received. Does the message contain the text "@noreply"?

It sounds like this is a problem with Recurring Events.

I'd like to help, can you give me a little more info on the situation? First, are your appointments tagged as "todo"? This might be important. Second, editing Recurring Events may be a little confusing, they have at least 2 parts to them, the "next occurrence", and "All Future Occurrences". Which one did you change? Did you change both? (Sometimes when you click on a recurring event there is a pop up box that warns you that you're going to change all future occurrences of the repeating event. Did you see this pop up, or did the edit box show up with the two different options "this occurrence" and "All Future Occurrences"?)

Do a search on a keyword and find all instances of one of your Recurring Events that is malfunctioning. That might be helpful. (The search box on the Sandy webpage defaults to searching all archived, done and past events.) What do you see?

There may be a lot of "done" Recurring Events show up in your list, but that's OK. Every time a Recurring Event is tagged as "done" it actually creates a new instance of the event and marks the new instance as done. (At least I think that's what happens.)

Is there any other oddity besides the extra Twitter/email messages? Are the messages the only thing that's concerning you? It might help to figure out what's wrong.

I'm glad the problem was fixed for you guys. It is confusing though, the instructions to fix the problem don't seem to be very different than what you've tried previously.

Going over the instructions in detail, I noticed two possible differences:

1) Turn on the private calendar feed *again*, without turning it off.
I recall another bug somewhere that had the same fix. Do it twice in a row.

2) Click on the "download" link first.
It's possible that clicking on the "http" link and downloading the *ics file first (before using the "webcal" lnk) helped in some manner.

I wanted to add "notes" to my contacts, arbitrary text like where I met this person, what the date was, when I contacted her last, etc. But Sandy won't save any notes. So I used a label.

Department: Brea. "He called on Monday March 10th at 5:43PM. He said the idea was interesting, but he needed 2 years of experience and three monkeys sitting in a row in order to get it approved."

It seems that Sandy supports only a few preset things about a contact. Through trial-and-error, I've learned some of the labels Sandy supports for a contact. (There can be multiple uses of the same label.) Be careful with "Name:" using it starts a new contact.

Address: Phone: Office Phone: Mobile Phone: Department: Organization: Birthday: Email: Url: Title: Org:

I have also been able to make some of my own labels.

Fsa Department: Claim Department: Department Brea: Their Phone:

See http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy... – kevin1, on July 16, 2008 07:57

Is it possible to create a "checklist", A list that contains multiple todo items?

Currently, no. The closest you can come is to create multiple todo items and give them all the same tag. See http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy...

See http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy... – kevin1, on July 16, 2008 07:33