37signals Product Blog

Highrise's four levels of permissions

Highrise lets you set permissions on people, companies, cases, and notes. It's a great way to select who gets to see what information. Keep your personal contacts private. Limit certain data so only, say, the marketing department can see it. Or open information up so anyone on your team can access it. It's up to you.

There are four levels of permissions for each item:

1. "Everyone" means every user that has access to your Highrise account can see this item.


2. "Only I can" means only you can see this item.


3. "Select a group..." allows you to select a pre-formed group of people who can see this item (more on groups below).


4. "Select people..." allows you to select which people can see this item.

FAQs about Highrise permissions.

A file organizing strategy using Basecamp comments

Jamie and Sam are working on creating HTML emails for all the 37signals products. They setup a project for this in Basecamp, and they're using the newly available comments on to-do lists in a cool way.

There's a to-do for every email template that needs to be updated:

Once completed, the template itself is attached by Jamie as a comment for easy retrieval:

It's a creative way to use comments as a file organizing strategy.

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.

Create a calendar for a specific person/category in Backpack

In Backpack, you can have different calendars within your master calendar. These calendars are useful for grouping events by category or person. You might have calendars labelled "Sarah," "Jeff," or "Juan" for each one of those people. Or "business," "personal," or "travel" for those categories. Each of these calendars can have a different color also. Events will then show up in that color.

To choose the Calendar you want, click the "Calendar" link at the top of every screen.

Then click the "Add a calendar" link in the right sidebar.

Name the calendar, choose its color, and choose who can view it.

Now add an event and select the calendar you want from the calendar pulldown.

Related: Backpack Calendar FAQs.

Campfire video tip: Name shortcut

37signals' Jamis Buck shows a quick shortcut you can use to call out individual names in Campfire.

See your team's Twitter posts inside Campfire

Des Traynor works with Contrast, a web application development company. The team is geographically split (3 in Dublin, 1 in Northern Ireland), so they use Campfire for day to day chatting in order to "recreate the office atmosphere."

Recently they've begun including their twitter feeds in Campfire too. Des says, "This is really helpful as often a tweet by one of us will start a Campfire discussion, and conversely sometimes one of us will tweet the outcome of a Campfire chat."

At Contrast, we use Campfire extensively every day to keep in touch, share links, make plans and discuss projects. We also love Twitter, and often use it to have small public conversations viewable by anyone and everyone, but also to share ideas that often originate from discussions that we’ve had in Campfire.

Last week, Des suggested that it would be great if we could see things that team members were posting on Twitter from inside Campfire. I got the rationale straight away: I often have Campfire open all day, but turn off Twitter, which is often distracting while working on something else. It’s useful and fun to see what the other guys are talking about.

Twitter2Campfire

Anyway, I liked the idea and decided to do something about it. I was able to quickly create a feed on Twitter search that pulls in all tweets from @eoghanmccabe, @paulca, @davidjrice or @destraynor. A small script now runs every minute and pulls in the feed and posts new updates to Campfire. Now we can keep a track of the conversations we’re having outside Campfire, inside Campfire.

I’ve published the source code to the script on GitHub if you’d like to play with it yourself.

Backpack reminders can help you quit smoking

"What the World’s Healthiest Guys Know" [Men's Health] talks about quitting smoking. The magazine's hot tip? Use Backpack to send yourself daily text messages encouraging quitting. A study showed that reminders like that double your chances of success.

Here's an area where the United States kicked butt: Only 19 percent of American men smoke, as opposed to more than half the men in South Africa, China, and Ukraine. And 70 percent of U.S. workers are covered by smoke-free rules.

What you can learn from your brothers: Still one of the 19 percent puffing? Set a quit date and rally support. A study published in Tobacco Control reports that people who received daily text messages encouraging them to quit were twice as likely to stop smoking 6 weeks later, compared with those who went textless. Go to backpackit.com to send text messages to yourself on preset days and times.

You can use Backpack for more mundane tasks too. In response to the article, Twitter user Warren posted this: "i have Backpack send me reminders to shave. seriously."

The secret to writing a successful to-do list

Some helpful advice for to-do list makers in Basecamp, Backpack, and Ta-Da List: In "Clearing Up a Blurry Work Life" [NY Times], Gina Trapani, the founding editor and lead blogger for Lifehacker, the popular site that offers “tech tricks, tips and downloads for getting things done,” offers her secrets for writing a successful to-do list.

There are lots of ways you can make a to-do list into something that actually gets done. Often when people get to the point when they are writing it, they are doing a brain dump. They just have to just get things down on paper. But to get to the point where you’re checking things off, you want to make it a do-able to-do list. Things need to be as easy for yourself to do as possible. So you have to break things down into tasks. We sabotage ourselves by writing down things like “Plan the anniversary party” or “Learn French.” Those are projects, not tasks and don’t belong on your to-do list.

Read the full article.

Backpack helps on-again, off-again project stay on track

In "How to manage long breaks in your software side projects" [Signal vs. Noise], 37signals Ryan Singer shows how he uses Backpack to manage an on-again, off-again side-project he manages.

I make a single Backpack page for each project with two lists and some notes. The two lists are ‘To-Do’ and ‘Debt.’

The ‘To-Do’ list is for things I really, truly, honestly plan to do next. I keep it very short, always less than five items. If it gets any longer, I’m probably fantasizing instead of actually planning to do those things. Whenever I return to a project, the top item on the To-Do list tells me what I should work on.

The ‘Debt’ list is for things I should have done but didn’t bother to do. The Debt list is partly a psychological trick. It helps me cut corners without feeling too guilty. Should’ve added validations to that model? Add it to the Debt list. Wrote a condition without thinking too deeply about the edge cases? Just add it to the Debt list. But it’s also more than a band-aid for laziness. If something breaks or I run into some unexpected behavior, chances are a quick glance at the Debt list will point me to a corner that I cut or a step I skipped and lead to a direct solution instead of an hour of head-scratching.

Lastly my Backpack account is SSL protected, so I feel safe storing information about my production environment. I can never remember where a project is hosted, what the username and password are or if there are particularities with the configuration I should know about. I keep all this server info on a note at the top of the page, so each time I need to log in I don’t have to go digging for passwords or welcome emails from my host...

For the Backpack lists, try to be brutally honest. A mile long To-Do list is proof of time wasted, not time saved. Focus your To-Do list on the next few things you need done, and limit your Debt list to Debt that actually matters.

Read the entire piece.

All about tags in Backpack

A tag is a simple label or keyword you can use to categorize your Backpack pages any way you want. Then when you click a tag you can see all the other pages that have that tag. It’s a great way to keep your pages loosely grouped in ways that make sense to you.

For example, if you have a page called “Sales meetings” you might want to tag that page “business, meeting, sales, office” or whatever you feel best describes this page. Here's a walkthrough on how to add and use tags in Backpack:

To add a tag, click the "Tags" link at the top of the page you want to tag.

Then add your tags and click the "Add these tags" button. Separate each tag with a space and use quotes for tags with more than one word ("new business").

Once you've tagged a page (you can add as many tags as you want to a page), you'll see the tags at the top of the page.

Clicking a tag will show all the other pages with that tag. Or, you can click the "My Pages" link in your sidebar. On that page you'll see a list of all the tags you've created.

Click a tag and you'll see the list of pages that match that tag.

How 37signals uses Campfire

Campfire is where our team — local and remote — gathers everyday. We use it to chat, show each other screenshots, get feedback, upload files, collaborate on copy, share code, get alerts when sites are modified, search previous conversations, and much more.

It does so many disparate things that it's sometimes tough for us to explain its power. People get it but they don't always really get it. The screenshots and video tour at the Campfire site are a good start. But there's so much more.

A few months back, we posted a series of entries at Signal vs. Noise about 37signals' usage of Campfire to show 1) how we work and 2) all the little things that we get done in Campfire every day. All screenshots from the series are from real usage and were taken during a single week. It will give you lots of ideas on how you can use the group chat tool and you'll see why we couldn't live without it.

Behind the Scenes at 37signals posts:
Design
Coding
Sysadmin and development
Copywriting
Support
Miscellaneous
Postscript

And here's a sample of what you'll find in these posts:

Ryan commits a change. Then he uploads a revised screen and explains what’s different.