peek into campfire

wrote a small web app a couple of weeks ago, to aggregate messages from all rooms of a campfire account. its called peek into campfire :-)

we use campfire on our current project at eos, to help us be up to date with everything that's happening on the project. its a really nice way to communicate when the team is very distributed, like in our case. we have people working in 2 offices in bangalore, one guy in pune and the client folks in california.

we have setup our campfire account to have one room per person in the project. everyone writes about the stuff they are working on, in their own rooms and also reply or comment on others' updates. the painful part of using campfire though, was viewing everyone's transcripts. campfire shows one transcript per day per room, and that means we need to click open these transcripts, every few hours. That's a lot of tabs and it gets even worse when you see that quite a few of the transcripts just have messages indicating people entering or leaving the room.

so thought a little screen scraping would be useful and created peek into campfire. its a rails app that uses mechanize and hpricot to do the scraping. it was good fun scraping and re-organizing campfire data. all the clean html from 37signals surely helps :-) another nice tool i discovered while doing this little project was heroku. they surely have made it easy to deploy and fix issues by directly editing your code online. git access to the deployed code makes it even more smooth.