So, in accordance with my plan to switch client communication from phone to email, I have decided that, instead of a Cell Phone, I will carry a Peek with me.  While it has been a rocky road so far, I trust that the people at Peek have some good updates coming down the pipeline, so I’m going to stick it out for a couple months and see how I like it.

The thing about the Peek is that it’s eMail only.  And I really do mean only.  No calculator, no games, no web browser, and no calendar.  For me, that just won’t do– I am an avid fan of Remember the Milk.  I keep it in my OS X dashboard and on my desktop email screen (I use GFYD, Google For Your Domain).  Having my RTM to go is a must.

Currently, RTM offers a couple email-based options.  You can email in new tasks, you can receive a list of your tasks for the day every morning via email, and you can receive an email reminder before a task is due.  This is a good start, but there are some problems:

1) With the daily schedule emails, you can only see what’s going on that day, you can’t see your entire schedule.  This information is crucial for setting appointments.

2) Reminder emails don’t have the task name in the subject line, meaning you have to open the email to see what you’re supposed to do.

3) You can’t do anything with the tasks– no marking them completed or postponing, you have to do this from the computer.

So, I wrote my own email interface, and will go over it and include my source files so you, too, can build your own (if you’ve got some PHP know-how).  If there’s enough interest, I will build a standalone, hosted solution for everyone of every skill level.

Now, you’ll note that I didn’t mention any problems with the task submission, that’s because it works pretty well already… the only issue I ran into there is that the Peek gives an alert every time you try to submit a new task because your RTM task submission email address contains a “+” sign.  So I simply added an email address to one of my domains that forwards to my RTM address.  Problem solved.

Issues with my RTM email interface:

1) I use the time estimate field to store my flag as to whether or not a notification has been sent.  This isn’t a field that I, personally, use.

2) I have built this to use only one list, my inbox.  If you want to use more lists, go for it, this script should give you a good starting point.

3) Even with my source code, this is a pretty technical process to get this up and running on your server.  I’m providing this to help those of you who have a basic understanding of PHP and REST/JSON data structure save a little bit of time.  If there is sufficient interest, I will consider building a service to do this for you– if you are interested, please post a comment letting me know.

4) These instructions assume that you already have an API Key and Shared Secret and a frob and token with read/write access to your user account.  If there are a lot of questions about this, I can post a separate how-to.

You are welcome to use this information for personal projects and distribute it with proper accreditation.

This interface uses 3 scripts, I will go through each in a separate blog post:

1) Schedule

This script sends me my full schedule at 7am, noon, and 5pm (It is triggered by crontab).   Here’s what one of those emails might look like:

Past Due:
-------------------------
Wed, Mar 4 2:00pm - call leanne smith re: PSD files
Thu, Mar 5 6:00pm - Send Back Candles

Upcoming:
-------------------------
Fri, Mar 6 10:00am - Change netflix plan
Fri, Mar 6 10:00am - Pay Care Credit Bill
Fri, Mar 6 10:00am - Pay Sallie Mae
Fri, Mar 6 12:00pm - call kennebec re contract
Sat, Mar 7 10:00am - Haircut!
Sat, Mar 7 11:00am - Go see an unlikely weapon at noon
Wed, Mar 11 8:30am - Dog Grooming @ Happy Paws
Wed, Mar 11 4:00pm - Meet with B. Peterson @ 430
Thu, Mar 12 5:15pm - Take out the Trash

Future:
-------------------------
Wed, Mar 18 3:45pm - Meeting w/ J. Doe at 4:30
Fri, Mar 20 8:15am - Dentist Appt
Sat, Jun 6 1:00am - Call Barbara to set up meeting on the 10th

     March 2009
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
 1  2  3  4  5  6  7
 8  9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31

     April 2009
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
          1  2  3  4
 5  6  7  8  9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30

      May 2009
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
                1  2
 3  4  5  6  7  8  9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31

     June 2009
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
    1  2  3  4  5  6
 7  8  9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30

You can see, also, that at the emails I’ve tacked on the next 4 months worth of calendars so I can see what’s coming up!

2) Reminders

To replace the reminder emails, I have a script that runs every 5 minutes to check to see if I have any tasks coming up within the next 30 minutes.  It then generates an email in which the subject is the name of my task followed by the Task ID, Task Series ID, and List ID (all of which are period delimitted).  This allows my next script to work its magic as well as putting my task info right there in the subject line so I can see what’s going on.

3) Modifications

This script checks a secret gmail account every 5 minutes, reads my messages and processes them based on the Process Code I send in.  The process code is the first letter in an email– if it’s “C” then this script tells RTM that the task is Completed.  If it’s “P”, the script tells RTM that the task is Postponed.  It figures out what the task is by parsing the numbers at the end of the subject line.

So… that’s what we’ve got!  Scripts are on their way and should be up today, please let me know what you think, and feel free to leave any questions in the comments field below.