We’ve recently been experimenting with celltell voiceNote for Backpack and found it quite useful. Think of it as voicemail for your Backpack account.
All you do is sign up, enter up to three phone numbers you’d call from (your cell, your home, and work, for example), your Backpack URL, and the email address for whichever Backpack page you want to send voice notes to (yes, Backpack pages have email addresses). Then you get a phone number to call. When you call that number you leave a message after the beep and then it shows up on your Backpack page a few minutes later.
A voice note looks and sounds like this:
You can play the note, pause the note, rewind the note, and even save the note to your computer (click the eject button on the right side of the player).
It’s a really cool little tool. It works with all Backpack plans — including the free plans. And as of now the service is free. A big thanks to Ali who put this service together and continues to make it better. We certainly hope you like it.
July 26, 2006 in Announcements
We’ve dropped the top tier Backpack Premium account to $14/month from $19/month. Now each tier is no more than $5 apart from the previous tier. $5/month for Basic, $9/month for Plus, and $14/month for Premium. And of course there’s still the free account. Check out the updated account chart if you’re interested. And let’s all give a high five to economies of scale!
March 14, 2006 in Announcements
PackRat is a tool for Mac OS X users that lets you take your Backpack data offline with you and sync it up when you get back online. Great use of the Backpack API.
February 27, 2006 in Announcements
A Backpack user has begun to build a Konfabulator Widget for Backpack. It’s still in early development but it’s certainly worth following if you are a Konfabulator user.
February 2, 2006 in Announcements
If you use Firefox you can have a list of your Backpack pages just a click away by using the new Backpack Pages Firefox extension. NOTE: This is a third party tool so we don’t provide official support for this product.
November 30, 2005 in Announcements
We just installed a new high-end switch and made some software changes that should result in faster Backpack speeds (especially under heavy loads). Thanks for your patience during some slow times.
November 4, 2005 in Announcements
We’re experiencing a little bit of hardware-related downtime right now. We’re making some hardware changes tomorrow night to knock out this issue. Sorry for the downtime. We should be back up in a few minutes.
UPDATE: And we’re back.
November 3, 2005 in Announcements
We just updated the interface for Basecamp to “match” the interface for Backpack and Writeboard. People using any of those tools will find it much easier to move between them now.
October 25, 2005 in Announcements
Michael K. Campbell writes about Harnessing the BackPack API on the Microsoft Developer Network site. Thanks Michael!
October 7, 2005 in Announcements
Business Week’s Best of the Web is asking for your votes. Backpack is up for Best Collaboration Tool. If you like Backpack, help us spread the word and make sure your vote is counted. Thanks!
August 24, 2005 in Announcements
We apologize for the extended downtime this morning. We ran into a few snags after pushing some database updates on Saturday night, but they didn’t show themselves until the massive load this morning. We believe we’ve finally got them under control and we’ll be keeping a close eye on everything today. It is possible that there will be some intermittent service outages today as we work on optimizing some database calls and code. We’re very very sorry about the inconvenience and we appreciate your patience and understanding.
August 8, 2005 in Announcements
We apologize for the downtime this morning — we had some database issues which caused major slowdowns and downtimes for some people. We’ve fixed the problem and are taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
Thanks for your patience and, once again, we’re sorry for the downtime.
June 9, 2005 in Announcements
Backpack is not just for you to love, but for machines too. The brand new Backpack API makes it possible for other programs to easily talk to your backpack. That opens the door to Dashboard widgets, weblog integration, command-line tools, and much more.
We’ve created a forum to go with the API, too. Let us know of your creations and share them if you can. The API is not all finalized, so hold off with the nuclear reactor integration for a couple of weeks. But have fun experimenting today.
If you’re working with Ruby, have a look at this sample wrapper for the API.
May 17, 2005 in Announcements
Despite the great uses we’ve already seen of integration with Flickr and other services, we’ve unfortunately been forced to prohibit user-created Javascript and form tags from all pages due to security reasons. This means you can’t add your own Javascript code or forms to your pages.
The problem is that prior to this update, a malicious user could trick an unsuspecting Backpack owner into accepting a shared page that contained Javascript for stealing the session key. Once stolen, this could be used to gain access to the account.
The technique is known as cross-site scripting or XSS. And although it only affected privately shared pages (which 99% of the time are only shared with people you know and trust), it was still too much of a risk to permit. It would basically set Backpack back to the days of where just opening an email in Outlook could give you a virus. We don’t want that and you don’t want that.
We are, however, dedicated to allowing integration with third party services such as Flickr through other means. We’re working on ideas for that. Thank you for your understanding. This is one of those fixes that really is for your benefit. If only the world was free of malicious users.
May 6, 2005 in Announcements
A few updates regarding the mobile reminders feature:
- Cingular mobile reminders are now being correctly sent to mobile.mycingular.com.
- We’ve added two options for AT&T — normal AT&T and “AT&T mmode” which are sent to mmode.com.
- We’ve added Rogers Wireless for our Canadian friends.
- We’ve added support for US Cellular (Thanks John).
May 5, 2005 in Announcements
To handle the massive load we’ve been experiencing, we had to reset the changes section. This also effects the data used for your RSS feed, which will now also appear empty. There’s no loss of page content, though, it’s just the activity log for what other people did to pages you share. We apologize for the inconvenience. On the positive side, the system performance has now been restored to “snappy”.
May 4, 2005 in Announcements
As the launch news continues to get out, we’re experiencing extremely heavy loads. We’re doing all we can to deal with these spikes, but there’s only so much we can do right now. You may experience some errors, slow patches, and short pockets of downtime over the next few hours as we make adjustments to deal with the demand. This is a short term problem. We apologize for the inconvenience and we are working on it. Thanks for hanging in there with us.
May 4, 2005 in Announcements
