Basecamp Quicklinks
We use Basecamp to manage a great number of our projects. It’s a great tool—easy to use, makes us more productive, and our clients have told us it makes us look good (we need all the help we can get!).
However, because we have so many projects that we manage with it, I’m regularly frustrated with the two- to three-clicks that it takes to accomplish common tasks.
So I hacked together a greasemonkey script called basecamp_quicklinks
A Basecamp project with the quicklinks script enabled.
It makes it easy to:
- Add a new project w/o going back to the dashboard
- Add a new message w/o going to the messages tab
- Add a new to-do list w/o going to the to-do list tab
- Add a new milestone w/o going to the milestones tab
- Add a new file w/o going to the files tab
- Record time w/o going to the time tab
You can add a new project without going back to the dashboard.
The header gets quicklinks to common “new” activities.
There are a couple of important caveats with the time recording functionality:
- It defaults to the current day
- You’ll have to find and add your basecamp “person id” to the script. The easiest way to find your person id is to go to the dashboard, then the to-do tab. View source and find the id associated with your name in the “responsible_party_form”
Log your time from just about any project page.
To get basecamp_quicklinks working:
- Make sure you have greasemonkey installed
- Download it
- Install it just like any other greasemonkey script
- Edit it & add your basecamp “person id”
- Check the javascript console for test output
- Edit it to turn off logging
This is an early, basically untested script. There’s lots of room for improvement. A couple of items that come to mind:
- Add confirmation on successful time logging
- Prompt user when leaving a project to record their time
Please let me know what you think!
Garrett Dimon Said,
September 18, 2005 @ 7:18 pm
This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to seriously start considering using GreaseMonkey. I tried it out, but wasn’t impressed. However, with new stuff like this, it might be time again.
Rob Said,
September 28, 2005 @ 11:28 pm
Excellent work. Patrick. It’s already indispensible!
Working on anything else for Basecamp? I’d be lost without it too, and am looking for some cool Greasemonkey/etc. hacks to make it behave more like Backpack, from an Ajax standpoint.
I’m just too danged busy to write any Javascript right now! ;-)
Thank you so much for your work.
patrick Said,
September 29, 2005 @ 3:54 pm
Thanks, Rob!
Yep, there are some improvements that I’d like to make. The top two are probably adding a timer for time tracking, and maybe reordering of to-dos (as was suggested on the basecamp forums).
Like you, though, my time to hack around with this is limited… We’ll see if the whim & the time strike me late some Saturday night :-)