Hi friends,
August had two storylines: the “packing boxes” from last month’s teaser, and the Unas integration finally clicking into place. Plus a lot more treework than I expected.
The move
Remember “packing boxes, but more on that another time” from last month? Here’s that other time: we moved. A week of packing and loading a truck with no coding, followed by a proper tree job on Gotland right after, so the transition from moving boxes to moving branches was more literal than I expected.
I actually ended up building a small ArbTask feature so we could use it ourselves on that job: activity tracking inside the time tracker, so hours logged on Gotland map to specific tasks instead of one big blob. Support for multiple organisations per user landed around the same time, which turned out handy for keeping this job separate from everything else in the system.
Unas: from “so close” to actually working
Last month I said the last piece of the Unas-Aukro connection was listing products on Aukro, and that we were building the whole thing on Aukro’s new OAuth2 flow instead of the old password-based one. Both of those got finished this month.
Categories, filtering, attribute loading, offer creation, listing, deleting (including mass deletion): it all came together piece by piece over the course of the month. The less visible work was the plumbing: cron jobs now keep product data in sync automatically, no manual refreshing needed.
OAuth2 landed in the last week of the month, and testing with Unas themselves is underway now. If that goes well, Aukro goes from one connected platform (Shoptet) to two.
ArbTask: invoicing
Closed out the month by building an invoicing feature on top of that time tracking work: generate an invoice straight from logged activities instead of copying numbers into a spreadsheet by hand. Small thing, but exactly the kind of admin work ArbTask exists to remove.
Rebuilding arbtask.com
Rocci Alvarez built the new arbtask.com design in Claude Design: homepage, pricing, and affiliate pages. Real ArbTask screenshots were the sticking point: no matter how we asked, Claude Design kept inventing its own made-up version of the interface instead of using ours. We eventually gave up fighting it and just swapped the images in by hand.
Turning the design into an actual working site took a few tries. The first export was one big self-contained HTML file: worked, sort of, but the navigation was broken and it felt more like a presentation than real website code. A proper zip of HTML/CSS/JS source files didn’t pan out either. What finally worked was Rocci exporting each page as its own standalone HTML file, which I then stitched together myself: navigation between pages, image swaps, page titles, meta tags, favicon.
It’s live now: arbtask.com is self-hosted plain HTML/CSS/JS, while the blog stays on Wix under blog.arbtask.com. Still tightening a few things (matching fonts and colors between the two, bigger buttons), but the new site is out the door.
Personal
More treework than expected this month, and different from what I’m used to: a lot of felling from the ground rather than climbing, which meant learning some new things quickly. Good, but it ate into coding time more than planned. Should even out next month.
— Pavel