Josh Haas's Web Log

I want a nice way of keeping track of who I haven’t talked to for a while, so I don’t fall out of touch with people.  Should be pretty easy, with all our contact information online.

Somewhat surprisingly, I wasn’t able to find anything I liked.  The closest I came was https://gist.com/, which is a cool tool to see all your contacts from all your social networks in one place.  But it didn’t have the one feature I really want — the ability to sort by the last time I contacted a person divided by the rough frequency at which I’d like to stay in touch with them.

So, I hacked together this: http://www.joshhaas.com/contact/.  It’s primitive, but it also does exactly what I’m looking for.  If anyone knows of a professionally-maintained tool that can do what my thing does, please let me know!

I built it using google’s contact data API, using the javascript library that they provide for accessing it.  I was disappointed in the quality of the library; the javascript version is lagging behind the most current version of the API, and there isn’t solid and accurate reference documentation.  Does anyone know what the deal is with this?  Is Google abandoning the javascript library?  That would be too bad, because Google’s data protocol is complicated enough that writing raw http/xml handling code would be very painful!

Open problem: I can’t host it on Google App Engine because authentication breaks.  I assume it has something to do with the fact that the data API recognizes GAE referrer URLs, and maybe something to do with me using an older version of the API (1.0 instead of 3, because the javascript library doesn’t work with later versions).  Haven’t figured out a workaround yet, so I’m hosting it on slightly slower shared hosting for now.