Two Minute How-To: Adding Social Networking To Your Basecamp Implementation

As a way to jointly manage and track projects with customers, Basecamp from 37Signals is currently the program to beat. However, it would be nice if Basecamp had a richer set of capabilities for understanding the “who” behind the people on the project.

So, fresh off a great time at Maker Faire a couple of weeks ago, we decided to poke around a bit and see if we could easily connect Basecamp with Haystack. It ended up being significantly easier than we thought. Got two minutes? Here’s what it takes:


Integrating Basecamp With Haystack To Enable Social Networking

1) Set up your Basecamp project

2) Set up your company’s Haystack

3) Go into the “People” tab in Basecamp, and click “Edit” under the person whose profile you want to connect

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4) Scroll down to the “optional” section in the Basecamp person information. Choose a field (the “title” field works well) and enter the following single line of HTML:

<a href=”http://haystack.cerado.com/profile/x“> My Haystack Profile </a>

(where x in the link corresponds to your Haystack profile number…you can find this in your profile permalink; in this example the number is “1”)

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Click “Save Changes.”

5) That’s it! Seriously.

Now, your Basecamp profile connects directly to your Haystack profile via its permalink.

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Enjoy!