Category Archives: Technology

Posts related to technology in general.

Better looking emails

The emails you get from Kerika, e.g. when someone assigns you to a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board, have gotten better:

  • The formatting is better: neater, cleaner, and there’s less verbose junk.
  • They are all sent from the same Sender Email — notifications@kerikamail.com — so your mail clients (like Gmail) do a better job of clustering them in your Inbox.
  • They all have better footers, explaining why you are getting the email, and how to contact us. (In other words, they are better at conforming to the CAN-SPAM Act.)
  • They look better on mobile devices: the subject headers are easier to scan, so if the email is something you expected, it is easier to delete it unread.
  • We eliminated the use of our logo, which saves (every so slightly) on bandwidth, especially on mobile devices.

 

Bug, fixed: when you have a lot of boards open, you could run into problems

We found and fixed a problem that a small number of users were experiencing: if you had a lot of boards open at the same time — say around 40 — and you then used the URL of any of these boards in some context, e.g. by including it in a chat message, you could run up into a “502 Bad Gateway” server error.

This really was an unexpected edge case — we had never considered that people might be working on 40 boards at the same time, nor that they would routinely have so many boards open, but it turns out that for professional services firms that use Kerika to manage their different client engagements, this was actually not that unusual…

The underlying problem was obscure: Kerika uses a cookie to keep track of which boards you currently have open.

This helps us restore your session perfectly if you exit Kerika and then return, e.g. by simply closing your browser or actually logging out and logging back in.

In the scenario where a user might have had 40 boards open, the cookie was becoming really, really large (as far as cookies go), and our Web server wasn’t set up to handle such large cookies.

Fixed.

Bug, fixed: handling references to websites that redirect to HTTPS

Some sites like Kerika.com use HTTPS all the time: every URL reference, whether to our website, within our application, or even to any article on this blog is automatically converted to a secure HTTPS session.

(We are not the only ones doing this: type in “facebook.com” in your browser’s address bar, for example, and you will be automatically redirected to “https://www.facebook.com/” even though you didn’t type in “https”.)

Always using HTTPS is good security practice, but it can sometimes lead to problems for users: unless you are very familiar with a particular site, and also the type of person who plays close attention to these things, you might not understand this process.

And even if you did, you would still find it convenient to make short references to “kerika.com” (or “facebook.com”) instead of typing out “https://kerika.com”.

When you include a URL in any part of a Kerika board’s contents, e.g. in a card’s details, it’s chat or its attachments (and the same goes for canvases), Kerika tries to get the title of that Web page so the URL reference is easier to read.

We found and fixed a bug related to this: in situations where the URL, as typed by the user, actually resulted in a redirect from the referenced website (typically a “301 permanent redirect” rather than a “302 temporary redirect”), Kerika wasn’t properly showing the Web site’s page title.

All fixed now.

AdBlock was messing up our website (even though we don’t serve ads!)

We discovered recently, to our considerable annoyance, that it is possible for AdBlock to mess up our website in a really serious way, even though we don’t serve up any advertisements of any sort (and never have.)

Here’s what was happening: when you use AdBlock, you have the option to add various lists of advertising sources. (You can find them here.)

One of these lists is from someone called fanboy.

If you subscribed to fanboy’s EasyList, for example, Kerika’s sign up page would not display the buttons for Kerika+Google and Kerika+Box:

AdBlock problems
AdBlock problems

(The same problem showed upon the Login page as well.)

It turns out that the EasyList filter uses JavaScript classes called social-media-header’ and social-media-button,  social-button and soc-button which were also the names of classes that Kerika was using.

The conflict caused Kerika’s signup and login buttons for Kerika+Google and Kerika+Box to not appear for Chrome and Firefox users who had AdBlock installed.

It took a while to figure out this was the cause.  We are not fans of fanboy.

Bug, fixed: Export notification wasn’t going away

A small bug fix we did recently: when you do an Export of data from a Task Board or Scrum Board, you get a notification from Kerika when the export completes: that’s because the export could potentially take a long time, if you had a very large board, i.e. with hundreds of cards on it.

(In practice, most exports take just a few seconds, so the notification comes very quickly after you start the Export.)

The notification comes in two forms:

  • By email, with a link to open the file containing your exported data.
  • In your Kerika Inbox, on the top-right of the Kerika application, looking like this:
Export Notification in Kerika Inbox
Export Notification in Kerika Inbox

There was a bug that clicking on the “Dismiss” button on Kerika Inbox didn’t make the notification go away: it would reappear after a page refresh.

That bug has been fixed. Enjoy.

Calendar syncing

We quietly released a new feature a couple of weeks ago that we now want to announce to the world: you can have all your Kerika due dates appear automatically on your Mac, Outlook or Google Calendar!

All you have to do is go to https://kerika.com/preferences (or click on the Preferences link that shows up under your photo in the top-right of the Kerika app), and then click on the Start Syncing button on that page:

Calendar syncing
Calendar syncing

You can sync to your Apple/Mac calendar, your Microsoft Outlook calendar, or your Google Calendar.

Pick your preference, and Kerika will show you detailed instructions on how to start syncing.

Here, for example, are the instructions for syncing to your Apple/Mac calendar:

Apple Mac Calendar synching instructions
Apple Mac Calendar syncing instructions

And here are the instructions for syncing to your Microsoft Outlook calendar:

Microsoft Outlook synching instructions
Microsoft Outlook syncing instructions

And, finally, here are the instructions for syncing to your Google calendar:

Google Calendar synching instructions
Google Calendar syncing instructions

You will notice that we have deliberately obfuscated the actual calendar URL for this particular user, in all three images above.

That’s important: your calendar URL is unique and precious — don’t share it with anyone!

As your cards on your Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards get new due dates, Kerika will automatically feed these updates to your personal calendar: you don’t need to do anything.

Kerika due dates always appear as “all day” events.

Please note that it’s up to  Apple/Microsoft/Google to determine how quickly these updates show up on your calendar.

On your Mac Calendar, for example, you can set the frequency with which these updates appear by doing a right-click with your mouse on the calendar and selecting Get Info:

Mac Calendar Info
Mac Calendar Info

And then setting the “Refresh time” for that particular calendar. (On Macs, the fastest that iCloud allows is every 5 minutes.)

Setting calendar auto-refresh time
Setting calendar auto-refresh time

 

Changing your Kerika password

For folks who sign up directly with Kerika, we store the user password (in an encrypted form, of course), which means that these users can change their passwords directly from within the Kerika application by going to their My Account page at https://kerika.com/my-account:

Changing password for Google sign up
Changing password for Google sign up

For people who sign up using their Google or Box IDs, we rely upon Google/Box to manage their passwords: in fact, we never even see anyone’s Google or Box password, even for a second!

So, their My Account page looks a little different, like in this example of a Kerika+Google user:

Changing password for Google sign up
Changing password for Google sign up

 

Bug, fixed: adding SharePoint URLs as attachments on cards

Thanks to one of our users at Washington State’s Employment Security Department, we found and fixed a bug that was causing problems when users tried to add SharePoint URLs as attachments on cards, for Task Boards and Scrum Boards.

The problem turned out to be in some code we have that tries to check whether a user is entering a valid-looking URL.  SharePoint’s URLs are somewhat unusual in that they include the “{” and “}” characters, which most other web servers don’t use.

Our old code was treating these characters as invalid, thereby rejecting URLs coming from SharePoint.

This has been fixed now.

Thanks!