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My Favorite Campfire Tips

We’re big fans of Campfire by 37signals here at PatientsLikeMe. Campfire is basically a group chat tool. We use it to stay connected, share files, and share ideas both when we’re all together in the office and when we telecommute a couple times a week.

We use Campfire so much that when I discover a new trick, it’s kind of a big deal. I though I’d share some of my favorites I’ve come across.

  1. Using Campfire with Fluid.app and Growl

    Let’s start with one I published right here. Since I always have Campfire open, it just made sense to run it in a site-specific browser (SSB) using Fluid.app.

  2. Drag and drop uploading

    You can easily share a file by browsing to it and clicking the upload button. Or you could just drag it to the chat screen.

  3. Formatted Tweets

    This one’s really slick. Basically, if you paste in the direct URL to a tweet, it will reformat it like this:

    Brogramming Twitter screenshot

    They’re still live, searchable text. They’re just prettier and save a click.

  4. YouTube clips in Campfire

    Similar to how Campfire reformats tweets, it will take a YouTube URL and show a preview image of the video. You do, however, need to play the video in a new tab/window as the image is an embedded video (although it looks like it).

  5. Type a person’s full name with just a few characters

    When I started at PatientsLikeMe, everyone was so formal in Campfire when addressing others. Posts would start with “Adam Darowski:” instead of just “Hey Adam”. Well, I finally figured out why. It’s this feature that will take something like “@Adam” and turn it into my full name.

  6. /play vuvuzela in Campfire

    Even those who didn’t follow the World Cup know what the vuvuzela is. If you want to play the ol’ plastic horn through Campfire, type:

    /play vuvuzela

    and laugh at your co-workers groans. This does have an excellent use though—if people are late for the daily standup, just play a vuvuzela and they’ll hear you from the next room.

  7. Campfire sounds: crickets, rimshot, and trombone

    I didn’t even know about this until after finding the vuvuzela feature, but it turns out you can also play crickets, rimshot, or—most importantly—the sad trombone. Seriously, no day of engineering is complete without a sad trombone.

That’s what I’ve got. Do you have any favorite Campfire tips?

One Comment

  1. On August 26th, 2010 at 2:11 am Dear Apple said:

    My favorite Campfire tip is to switch to http://jaconda.im and thus move chat room from web-browser (or say Flid.app) to my instant messenger.