Backpack Hacks

24 Jul

How to get the most of Backpack by thinking outside the box. Hacks and tips as compiled by Matt Croydon www.postneo.com

Backpack + Treo 4 May

Marc Hedlund teams up Backpack with his Treo 650 for a very useful workflow:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/05/my_favorite_use.html

Embedding Images 4 May

While attaching files and photos is a for-pay feature (and well worth it IMHO) you can directly embed images by using an tag in your note or body.

For example, this text embeds the image below:
<img src="http://www.backpackit.com/images/backpack_logo-small.gif"/>

A much easier way to embed images:
!imageurl!

HTML Entity Gotchas 4 May

When using HTML entities such as &gt; and &lt; watch out. Backpack helpfully renders the entities as the characters they represent when you edit.

Reminders 4 May

Don’t forget to take advantage of the Reminders tab. It does a great job at sending out SMS reminders too. There’s iCal support too, so I’m sure that lots of wicked things can be done.

Undocumented Text Formatting 4 May

See Backpack Notes for some undocumented text formatting features. According to the author of that page, markup follows Textism (A.K.A. RedCloth) rules.

This is really helpful, and should definitely be acknowledged somewhere on the site, as linking and image markup rocks. Then again we should probably be using the Images and Links sections, eh?

Backpack as Mailing List Repository 4 May

While we all know that GMail is the killer mailing list viewing app, wouldn’t it be nice to have your favorite mailing list information at your fingertips in a Backpack page?

To accomplish this, simply create a new page and sign up to your mailing list of choice with the email address for that page. Once the confirmation email comes in, reply to it to activate your subscription (if neccesary) and you’re on your way.

To see this in action, check out my Ruby Mailing Lists page.