Some background: gotta keep track of your recurring shared household tasks (replace the furnace filters, clean the toilets, etc.), right? Keep everyone in the family on the same page and make sure you don’t forget until the dust bunnies take over?

Apple Reminders does sync within the family and generate reminders, but things left in there bounce wildly between undiscoverable and “you may not use your phone until marking this complete.” The scheduling/recurrence system also isn’t flexible enough for the realities that sometimes you do stuff a few days late, which should influence the next due date.

So I did a homebuilt to-do thing a few months ago that keeps track of what’s coming up and fires off an email to everyone each morning with what’s on tap.

Which works just fine, but also leads us to this week’s diversion: I personally don’t use my email inbox as a to-do list. When I want to see what I have to do today, I go to Things. That’s really where I’d prefer tasks show up for me.

Oh hey, Things supports a custom URL scheme for editing tasks, so I could just put “Add All” links in my morning emails!

But of course, that doesn’t work, because Gmail on iOS & Android strips non-HTTP(S) URLs out with no indication they were ever links at all.

The eventual workaround: the “Add” link is actually an https:// link back to an endpoint on my own server with the smallest amount of data required to generate that things:/// URL and do a redirect.

All of this is actually very satisfying! Yet another recurrence of the realization that computers are fun when you use them to solve a small problem with tiny bits of glue.