28 Jan, 2010
On Writeboards and Basecamp
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.
