Backpack: yet another cool feature.
So, I’ve been idly poking at Backpack all day, loading various bits of data into it wherever I’ve figured they might be helpful.
I just discovered the coolest use of it.
Each page has a unique email address, and anything sent to that address is squirted straight onto the page. If your email has “note: [foo]” in the subject line, then it becomes a note called [foo] where the text is generated from the text of your email. You can upload images, files, and to-do list items like this, too.
Well, Backpack also stores the actual text of the email, too, in a series of accessible links on the relevant page.
So, I’ve set myself up a page called “Registrations”, and I’m forwarding all my emails with forum registrations, web service signups and the like, to that page via email. Presto, wherever I am in the world, I’ll have access to all my relevant user names and logins.
Bravo, Backpack – yet another handy feature. No piece of software is going to be everything to everyone, but Backpack’s coming awfully close. It’s a well-balanced mix of structure and simplicity; it seems to have the flexibility to handle whatever kind of content you want to include, while providing more structure and indexability than a blank text document would – or any other solution I’ve seen so far, for that matter.
Now all I need is for it to accept XML file imports and I’ll be happy.
June 1st, 2005 at 2:21 am
I’m not really sure that I would want all of my registrations and passwords on a public server, even my own. Keep in mind 37signal’s recent disaster with the Google Web Accelerator. In that particular case, you could either lose the page or you could see it indexed in Google.
I think copy and paste into a text file somewhere on your own computer is a lot safer. If other people have access to that computer or you think it might be lost/stolen (laptop), it might even be a good idea to have that file encyrpted.
Be careful out there!
June 1st, 2005 at 2:51 pm
The advantage of having it online is that it’s computer-independent and can be accessed wherever I am. I was envisaging using it for non-essential signups, generally – forum passwords and the like. Certainly I wouldn’t want to use it for anything really vital – no internet-banking passwords or anything like that. :)
Your points are very well-taken, though, and I’ll reconsider how I’m using Backpack for those sorts of things. I hadn’t heard about the situation with Google, though – what happened?
June 1st, 2005 at 10:47 pm
Some people used the the Google web accelerator when accessing their Basecamp accounts. The AJAX code reacted terribly to being prefetched. Sections were deleted, to-do’s were checked off. Basically havoc. Moreover, much of the content from those people’s sites went into Google. Whether any of it showed up in search results, I don’t think has been verfied (the GWA wasn’t supposed to be a spider).
In principle, the fault was with Google’s code and they withdrew the web accelerator but this is the kind of thing that you expose your data to when it’s on a page on the open internet. Just going back and forth between your computer and the server your data can be read at any point in between.
One should be careful about putting important passwords in emails. Passion-filled love letters should also probably be sent long-hand. Electronic data that is exposed to the internet has a tendency to live a life of its own.
But to return to forum signups and other low risk items, it sounds like a good use of the technology.