Shinji Kuwayama » Projects

On Writeboards and Basecamp

Shinji Kuwayama — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:42:27 +0000

Basecamp makes things easy, and I love it. Here’s an odd example though: Basecamp makes it incredibly easy to post the wrong link to a Writeboard—one which prompts for a mysterious password that no one knows.

I know how to avoid this mistake and in a moment, so will you!

Writeboard and Basecamp are actually separate products, much as Highrise and Campfire are separate. Basecamp provides Writeboard integration, and most people I know just think of it as a Basecamp feature (which is fine).

See, this is actually a Writeboard URL, and we’re not in Basecamp right now.

If you copy-and-paste the URL from the Location: field, you’re actually capturing a link to your Writeboard account, and not your Basecamp project. That’s why 37signals provides the “Share this Writeboard” link. If you want to link to this document Basecamp-wise, you must right-click the “Share this Writeboard” link, and select “Copy this link” (on a Mac, that is). You do not want to copy the 123.writeboard.com URL.

This is oddly inscrutable for a 37signals product and I hope it gets improved someday. In the meantime, we’ll just have to suck it up and make ourselves remember to link to Writeboards the right way and not the wrong way.

Project: Easy Star

Shinji Kuwayama — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 03:27:01 +0000

Easy Star Records needed a brand new site to support their artists and releases; we worked together to develop a Rails-based site with custom CMS.

If you’re a fan of Radiohead, check out Radiodread, it’s pretty cool.

Project: MOVE30

Shinji Kuwayama — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 13:15:29 +0000

I’m now working on a video community project called MOVE30. It’s currently in a soft-launch phase, where we carefully and quietly introduce it to potential members.

http://www.move30.com

Much in the vein of Lightstalkers, this is designed to support a community of multimedia artists and producers; members can upload and discuss short-form narrative video, whether fiction or documentary. The project was conceived by Jody Sugrue and Vince Diga, both professional video workers, and I’m very happy to join in. I’ll be posting more notes about the project; stay tuned.