Kudos to the 37signals team for launching what looks like a nice way to get the word out about their products.

I’ve been using Basecamp for three years and it’s been a great tool for collaborating with our clients.

Disclaimer: This is my get-rich-quick scheme for the day.

Yesterday afternoon, we were helping our newest employee, Paige Saez, get setup with new accounts across all of our applications. She uses Google Reader and couldn’t understand why her Basecamp RSS wasn’t working in it. We explained that Google doesn’t provide any way to subscribe to authenticated feeds (yet)... so it wasn’t something she could do. (I still use NetNewsWire because of this problem…)

During the discussion, I said that it probably wouldn’t take much effort to build a proxy for an authenticated feed… and Andy said he’d give it a shot.

10 minutes later… he had an initial version of a RSS proxy application, written in Ruby.

15 minutes after that, we had it up and running on a private server for all of us at PLANET ARGON to begin using.

...and here is the proof!

Wee! Authenticated Basecamp RSS feeds in Google reader. It even works with the openid authentication.

You can grab the code from Andy’s blog post and finally make the switch off of desktop RSS readers to Google Reader, because you know you want to. ;-)

Thanks Andy!

I finally decided to put my claimID to use today with the announcement that Basecamp now supports openID. This means that I can easily access all of my Basecamp project with a single login. Some of our clients have their own Basecamp projects and having everything spread around (different usernames, passwords…) made it difficult to manage. I just modified my accounts on a few Basecamp sites and now see them all listed for me to navigate between.

update: Minor annoyance. This caused all my RSS feeds to break because I subscribe to each project individually. I assumed that they’d allow me to now use my openid/password for all my RSS feeds/iCal subscriptions, but they provide you some unique hash for the password. Not sure why they decided to do that… instead of allowing me to use my openid/pass for the subscriptions.