BETA

Upcoming release, a sneak peek…

January 7th, 2009 • Everything else
Tags: basecamp, highrise, Progress

I’ve been working hard on a number things here, one of which is very close to being ready for release. After talking with a power user for a little bit, I couldn’t help myself and I have to post about it. I’m not going to say anything, just provide a screenshot…

Added reCAPTCHA to signup

December 1st, 2008 • Everything else, Progress
Tags: captcha, recaptcha, spam

Hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving! And, to those of you outside of the USA, hope you had a great weekend.

I was looking at my Periscope admin panel this morning and I noticed a really weird trend: firstname same as the lastname in registrations, concatenation in the names themselves where it didn’t make sense, and the same domain name for email addresses: @inmail24.com.

So I did a little investigation to see if these were genuine registrations since there was no use of the gadget at all for any of the usernames. Turns out they are forum spam bots that somehow found their way into Periscope Gadget.

As a result, I’ve added a reCAPTCHA challenge-response on the signup page: I have to believe that this will reduce those silly critters.

MinneDemo photos are up — it’s me :)

November 23rd, 2008 • Everything else
Tags: minnedemo

Here’s the real face behind Periscope Gadget — photos from MinneDemo last week, with yours truly showing Periscope off. That’s all.

GMail welcomes Periscope Gadget

November 12th, 2008 • 2 comments Everything else, Releases, Screencasts
Tags: gmail, gmail labs, Progress, Releases

Wonderful news this morning: Periscope Gadget is now available in your GMail!

Thanks to Gmail Labs & the ability to add a gadget to GMail, you can now add a special GMail Edition Periscope Gadget to your sidebar in GMail. Periscope for GMail is now just one of the other ways to interact with Basecamp, in addition to Periscope for iGoogle, for the iPhone and for Google Desktop for Windows. Awesome!

You’ll need to enable GMail Labs within your GMail account (see the screencast) and also add the Gadgets for GMail extension. Once you’ve done that, you’ll need the Periscope for GMail gadget URL, which is different that the iGoogle URL:

http://ui.periscopegadget.com/gm/periscope.xml

It’s all detailed in the Periscope for GMail screencast — so have a look at it, and add Periscope goodiness to your GMail. No iGoogle needed.

Screencast: Add Basecamp accounts to Periscope

November 1st, 2008 • Everything else, How To, Progress, Screencasts
Tags: add account, feature, Progress, screencast, ui, update

If you’ve logged in to your account on the Periscope Gadget home page recently, you will have noticed that the look has changed and a new feature has been added. I moved the information around a bit on the My Account page so that it made more sense to me and so that it was a little cleaner. Hopefully, you’ll agree.

I also added the ability for any beta user to now add a second and a third Basecamp account to Periscope on their own. When you log in it tells you exactly how many accounts you have left to add, and clicking opens up the New account block. Punch in your Basecamp details, hit Add account and the new account will show up on your list of accounts on the right. It will also be immediately available to your gadget, so a gadget refresh will result in the new account showing up there as well. Be sure to enter your credentials carefully, or you will run into issues displaying the data!

Checkout the screencast for a full demo of the new layout and account functionality.

Periscope Gadget at MinneDemo

October 21st, 2008 • Everything else

Luke Francl announced the Twin Cities’ premier tech demo and networking event today on the MinneBar Google group, MinneDemo. I’ll be giving a seven minute demo, no powerpoint, of Periscope Gadget at the event: it should be really fun! If you’re in the Twin Cities or will be on Wednesday November 12 at 7pm, stop by the event being held at Intermedia Arts in Uptown and say hi! I’d love to meet any local Periscope users and get some feedback. Here’s the full run down.

Multiple Basecamp Accounts in Periscope

October 8th, 2008 • Everything else

You may have seen the screencasts where we tout how Periscope can let you access more than one Basecamp account in one place… well, Periscope Gadget can do that for you right now! There is just currently no way for you to add those accounts yourself. So… if you’re a Periscope user, and you’d like to add a second or third (or even fourth) account to the gadget, just send us an email with the Basecamp URLs and we’ll get those added for you.

You’ll then be able to add your new usernames and passwords using the My Account feature on Periscope. Sweet!

Public Beta Now Open & Periscope on WebWorkerDaily

October 2nd, 2008 • Everything else, Mentions, Releases
Tags: beta, Mentions, Progress, registration, twitter

Yes, it’s true: Periscope Gadget is now open to the public. Go on over to the registration page, sign-up for an account and start using it immediately. What more can I say?

Also, thanks to @scoblitz for his piece about Periscope Gadget in Web Worker Daily! A great review where Scott points out how Periscope “lets you quickly and easily log activity and time towards your Basecamp projects” while also mentioning that new features are coming soon! Stay tuned, more to come!

Transparency on Basecamp Usernames and Passwords

October 2nd, 2008 • 1 comment Everything else
Tags: encryption, password, transparent

I’ve always thought that complete transparency is a virtue. It doesn’t matter what we’re talking about here: whether it’s inter-personal relationships, coach-team relationships or client-vendor relationships. If you’re reading this, you might be a little concerned that we’re storing your Basecamp username and password. Quite frankly, I would be too! Read on…

First of all, right now, there is no way to get around not storing them: the iGoogle framework simply doesn’t support POST nor HTTP AUTH. As a result, the Periscope backend acts as a pseudo-proxy taking requests from the gadget and doing all the necessary integration and logic to get data from your Basecamp account and serve it back to the gadget. And since your Basecamp account is password protected, Periscope needs to know those passwords to get at your data and serve it back to you. The nice thing about letting Periscope do all the heavy lifting is that it can do cool things like integrate more than one Basecamp account for you, do some time-tracking and even let you have access from things like your iPhone.

For the record, Periscope does not store any data that you request from the Basecamp servers. It merely proxies the data, filters and sorts and does whatever else you asked it to, and then serves it back to you. Periscope keeps logs of your activity in so much as it knows that you logged in and looked at the Recent Activity tab: but that’s about it! It does not know the content of the tab. It also counts clicks to various links you may click on. Periscope also leverages Google Analytics for other statistics.

What about the actual storage of passwords?

Your Periscope password (different than your Basecamp password) is not stored at all: we store a one way hash of your username and password. That way, if you forget your password we’ll have you reset it: we don’t have the ability to remind you what it is.

As for your Basecamp username and password, we store this information in a database and do so with the greatest amount of care: the username and password is encrypted using the MCRYPT_RIJNDAEL_256 cipher and stored in a physically different server than the encryption key. We are currently hosting with pair Networks who have an excellent track record and with whom we have been very happy. We also allow you to change your information from your My Account page at any time.

We built Periscope for ourselves and are glad to be able to share it with you. If you’re still concerned that your Basecamp username and password is being stored on an unknown server somewhere in the digital cloud, the best thing you can do is add a new person to your company in your Basecamp account (call it “Periscope User” or something similar), and use the credentials for that person in your Periscope stored account. That way, you’re not storing your own personal username and password, but rather a throw-away user that could be changed at any time. And remember to give it less than administrator privileges too, if you want to be even more careful!

Periscope listed in iGoogle directory

September 5th, 2008 • Everything else, Mentions
Tags: directory, igoogle

Periscope Gadget is now officially listed in the iGoogle Directory. Unfortunately, there are no ratings yet, no users are showing up as making use of the gadget and no-one knows about it. But! You can help change that!

If you have a spare moment, visit the Periscope Gadget listing on iGoogle and leave a comment about your experience so far: good, bad or otherwise. You will receive good karma points when you do.