trbo.io

I have been working on this project for a bit now - in bits and pieces mostly. I think it is in a place where I can open it up to a small audience. There will be glitches (do let me know) — and I am still a few weeks from launching it publicly but thought of opening it to the RI community. What is it? It is a journal-by-email solution (right now). You setup a schedule, get an email, reply to it and the system keeps track of the updates you want to remember. Why did I write it? I basically wrote it for my brother - who has quarterly performance reviews and is scampering towards the end trying to remember and track what he worked on. Instead, he now receives an email everyday (or every week) and just tracked his work there. Much easier to get this list later. What am I using it for personally? Micro journalling. Small updates to remember how my projects are shaping up and what I spent my day working on. It works quite well and I like the ability to reply to an email (from desktop or mobile) instead of having to open up a website / journaling tool to track this. Next steps • Telegram integration is coming soon — so you can do the same thing but with a telegram chat instead of email. • Attachment handling would be next on my list - simply forward attachment / PDF / invoice emails to the service and get a zip of stuff to send to your CA (for example). (This would save me some effort from doing this during tax season at the end of the month). What have I written it in? • Serverless on AWS (Nodejs) — taught myself for the project • Vue.js front end over AWS Amplify — again taught myself for the project. (Earlier version was in VanillaJS which worked but was not as much fun to work on). Freebies? For folks joining in before I slap a payment gateway in front of it (a few weeks from now hopefully), they would be grandfathered in for a perpetual subscription. Feedback? Would really love lots of it — I am learning while building this, so email me at: saurabh@trbo.io or you can even DM me here on RI. Sharing the project further? Privately - yes. As in with a group of friends, etc. Go for it. Publicly, not yet — I still need to add a few things in before launching it publicly — so would not want to do that now. The registration page is currently open and there is no waitlist. Where is it? https://trbo.io

So a friend of mine has been journalling on email as a habit since 4 years. he has record of everything that happened in his day till date. He starts writing his day as a draft and send it accross as the day ends. at some point I proposed him to build a product over this Idea. He was okay with what he had in the workflow, so I dropped the Idea. I will share this with him, if he gets some value out of it or provide some feedback

Ah nice. Thanks Anubhav. That is very interesting. I used to journal religiously for 10+ years on a physical journal — but now I don’t have any place to keep them — and they have sensitive information 😬 Writing on an app (I have tried the Day One Journal) is not just the same. Email is better. Your friend has a good idea. Do let me know if he has any feedback on this.

I can feel it would be super helpful, sometimes I go blank when people ask me what I did over the past 3 years lol, I have written alot of code but haven't written it down, maybe this will help

Yes. That is an AWS Cognito gotcha. Let me fix it for you.

btw, where do I send an email to record my notes?

@crooked-tent-69024 You should have already received a welcome email from: update@mail.trbo.io (Let me know if you haven’t). Whenever you have scheduled your emails to come (via the setup), an email will be sent to you from: update@mail.trbo.io You can reply to that email. I have this configured for myself at 6PM everyday (close of day). Alternatively, just send an email to: update@mail.trbo.io anytime and you should see it on your dashboard. (Takes about 5-10 seconds).

nice 🙂, tried it, super cool 😄

Hi Saurabh, I gave it a quick try now! First impressions are pretty good. The onboarding was good and to the point. And email prompts are the killer feature 💌 Good luck with the public launch 🚀

@loud-glass-33663 I signed up hoping to do more tracking. Almost immediately, I missed being able to have some way to tag the entries or at least separate them into high-level topics since I work on two or possibly three unrelated projects. It is probably on your feature list in which case I'll just put them in different entries and add the tags or put them under different projects when that feature appears. The signup process itself was quick and painless, though. Good luck with the product.

Hey @helpful-gigabyte-47939. Excellent - thanks for the feedback. The tagging feature is in my list of stuff to do. For now, I tag all my entries with a #tag anywhere in the body. In the short term, I’ll make them click-able so that you can quickly scan by the tags and in the long term, tags will become a first class citizen and you should be able to use tags as tags. But for now, just add the #tag in the email - they will start working in sometime.

@loud-glass-33663 So what is a good format to use for #tags in emails? Do you plan to support per line tags?

- did foo bar #baz #qwerty

- refactored abc xyz #baz

Hmm.. That is a good point @helpful-gigabyte-47939 Tags will be tied to each email you send through - and you can use tags anywhere in the body of the email. I generally add:

#trbo
Did some work today

But you can add them anywhere. So basically if you search for #baz, it will show you the entire email (post) which has #baz in it and I am not planning to parse it per line. That would make my already complicated email parsing logic, more complicated. (When I say per line, I meant that when you search for #qwerty, it shows only the first line and not the 2nd line) One thing I was thinking about was to offer a post split functionality based on tags - to make it less cumbersome. So for example,

#projectA
Did some work here
---
#projectB
Did some more work here

Would end up as 2 separate posts. You can add the

---

separator in the middle to create 2 (or multiple posts) from the same email. (This is not implemented as yet).

So basically if you search for #baz, it will show you the entire email (post) which has #baz in it and I am not planning to parse it per line. That would make my already complicated email parsing logic, more complicated.

I'd think that parsing this per-line would actually simplify your parsing logic since you don't need to save state (or have a file format) to detect which tag is "active" as described in your example for #projectA above. Every line gets saved in the db separately along with associated tags. But I'm very likely missing some nuances. :-)

(When I say per line, I meant that when you search for #qwerty, it shows only the first line and not the 2nd line)

OK, that basically means I should reply with two emails for two separate tasks (and tags) to avoid unrelated things showing up. I can live with that. As long as I know the rules for this future feature. Thanks again.

Yeah. Thanks @helpful-gigabyte-47939 Basically in my limited testing with a bunch of email clients, they behave very differently with their “text” part of the email which I am using. My email client (Newton) for example, does the markdown thing in which it will not add a

\n

unless there are 2 line breaks. So I need to remember while using Newton to add to

<returns>

to add 1 line break. Other clients fare slightly better but have their own issues which I have patched for. Then there is the issue of detecting where an “original” email begins and where your reply ends. I am using some libraries but also need to massage the data. If you use an HTML email signature which you don’t cleanly delete before sending, that also complicates things sometime. I will definitely be adding a page-break handler. So in the future if you add:

---

In the middle of your email, it will split the email in 2 at that point and create 2 entries - so you can send only 1 email.