After launching Cheqlist last week, I felt compelled to give you a peek under the covers to see the tools involved and why I chose certain technologies. I hope to give you insight for times where you decide what to work with.

Getting started

Before I could really start working on a major project, I had to choose a VCS. I went with mercurial based on a friend’s insistence that I introduce myself to a DVCS (specifically Hg) immediately. I knew what it was but never took time to try it myself. I am very glad I tried it.

Anyone looking to stay productive with their work, errands or chores keeps a to-do list. You need to have that to-do list available at all times and be easy to manage.

With that in mind, I am introducing an application that I think will help you with that: Cheqlist. A desktop application powered by Remember The Milk that does 2 things very well: make managing tasks very efficient and look sweet on your desktop.

What makes Cheqlist awesome

I wanted to build an application that I, myself, would use everyday. There are a few key features that would make that happen:

I recently switched to hosting all of my own websites. While it is liberating to have much more control over my web host, it begs for more maintenance time and better tools to help you monitor your server.

While browsing my GitHub account I came across Mark Sanborn’s site monitoring script and thought: “Hey this is a good idea, let’s see what I can make of it”. I have been meaning to post more Python here so I updated his code a bit and thought I’d share it with you. I hope you have ideas for improvements.