Backpack Journal Dashboard Widget

1 minute reading time

At work we use quite a few 37signals products to manage our internal processes and client projects, one of which is Backpack. 37signals recently introduced a new feature, Journal, for tracking what you’ve done and what you’re currently doing which we’re trying out to see if it’s a good fit for us. On their product blog there was a recent post about a Dashboard widget for updating your status and journal entries.

That’s pretty cool, I thought, but kinda redundant because Safari on Leopard has an awesome, but probably somewhat underused, webclip button which allows you to grab part of a webpage and have it turned into a widget. And as all programmers know, the best code to write is no code. So I have grabbed the updating part of the page as per the widget described and also the team’s recent updates. As a double bonus, it updates the clips when you invoke Dashboard so you get the latest team updates straight away rather than what you’d normally be having to do is refresh your browser’s page yourself.

Ok, I’m blind, where’s this button?

Right here…
Webclip

And this is what mine looks like on my Dashboard. The webclip widgets also allow you to put different frames around the clip, just flip it over and pick from the options. This season my two widgets are sporting the latest in Torn Edge and Glass themes fashion.

Backpack on Dashboard


Got any questions or comments? Drop me a message on Twitter (@elaptics).