Productivity Sauce

Running a Web-based task manager on your own server makes a lot of sense, but what application should you choose? If you are looking for a lightweight, user-friendly task management tool, you might want to give myTinyTodo a try. This little app is easy to install, it offers all the essential features, and it sports a slick Ajax-based interface.

To install myTinyTodo, grab the latest version of the application from the project's Web site, and unpack the downloaded archive. By default, myTinyTodo uses a SQLite database to store its data, but this requires the SQLite database installed and configured on your server. Alternatively, you can configure myTinyTodo to use a MySQL database. To do that, open the db/config.php file in a text editor, uncomment the following line, and specify the required database connection values:

 $config['mysql'] = array("localhost","user","password", "mytinytodo");

The config.php file contains a few other settings for you to tweak. If you want to protect your myTinyTodo installation, specify the desired password in the following line:

 $config['password'] = "";

To give other users read-only access to your task list, find the $config['allow'] = "no"; option and change its value to read. Upload the resulting mytinytodo directory to the document root of your server and point your browser to http://yourserver/mytinytodo/setup.php to create the required database tables.

Although myTinyTodo is not the most advanced task manager out there, it does offer a few features that make it easier for you to keep tabs on the tasks. For each task, you can specify a priority, a due date, and tags as well as add notes. myTinyTodo lets you sort the tasks by priority or date, and you can also sort tasks manually via drag-and-drop. The Search feature can help you to quickly find specific tasks, while the Tags drop-down menu allows you to display tasks containing a specific tag. You can also use the Tasks drop-down menu to view the tasks that match the specified criteria, for example, Overdue, Today and tomorrow, Soon, etc. To make it easier for you to add tasks, myTinyTodo sports the smart syntax feature which lets you specify priority and tags directly in the Add task field. For example, the command below adds the Finish the myTinyTodo article task with priority +1 and the articles and writing tags:

 /+1/ Finish myTinyTodo article /articles, writing/

Finally, myTinyTodo provides an alternative layout optimized to mobile devices, so you can access and edit your tasks from your Android device or iPhone. To do this, simply append ?pda to your myTinyTodo's URL address, for example: http://yourserver/mytinytodo/?pda
All in all, myTinyTodo is a nifty little Web-based task manager which has pretty much everything you need to keep tabs on your tasks with consummate ease.