Backpack: Getting Organized Online

Backpack is a web based application for keeping your information organized online. I find it quite useful for all teleworkers and I've been using it for more than a year.

Most of us spend many hours in front of a computer and running a browser; hence, it makes sense using the same interface to access our data, that's what we've been doing for years with email, using Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and more recently Gmail.

I stopped using pen and paper many years ago and, even if I have an old but hard working Sony Clie PDA, I'm more comfortable writing in a computer. Backpack was all I needed to keep track of my to-do lists, related files and even drafts of new articles (including this one) when I was out of town a couple of weeks last month.

Backpack is a service offered by 37 Signals, a company known, and highly respected, by their emphasis in creating effective and easy to use web based applications using a mix of technologies commonly known as Web 2.0. Web 2.0 applications are online services that behave like regular desktop software, where you don't need to wait for pages to refresh when making changes and the flow of data is quite more natural. Many users won't find anything spectacular about this, that's good: if you don't need to think much then it's easier to use.

In Backpack you write in pages and every page include a body, notes, lists, attached images, files, links and writeboards (which I'll explain in just a moment).

You can also use Backpack to create reminders which will be sent to your email or mobile service provider (if supported by Backpack).

Backpack's basic service is free, it will show you some unobtrusive ads and allow you to create just five pages, ten reminders and two writeboards at a time. You can't upload images or attach files in the free version either. Fair enough for most uses.

The paid version starts at US$ 5 a month and gives you space for 25 pages and allows the use of images and files.

How To Use Backpack

It depends on what you need, I read about a web based magazine using Backpack in the publishing process, I plan to do that with the site I'm designing for Ventanazul community. Some guy wrote an article about using Backpack for taking notes in his classes, of course he had Wi-Fi available at school. There are many other possible uses:

• Music you should listen or buy.
• Meetings notes.
• Ideas for articles you plan on writing.
• Design concepts: fonts, logos, web page mock ups.
• Planning your next family trip.
• Clothes and shoes sizes for all members in your family.

Register at Backpack and start using it in a few minutes. You will find the first page ready in your first login, move your mouse over the title of the page and you will see a yellow background with the word edit to the left, just click on it to change and save a new title without reloading the page, this is Web 2.0 behavior, you will find many others like this all over Backpack.

Use any descriptive name for your pages, just make sure they're clear to you. I have a page called Ideas for Telework People, with information related to this site and services I can offer to teleworkers.

Above the title there's a link named add tags, tags are words you can use to better organize your pages. My Ideas for Telework People page uses the following tags: brainstorming, ideas, teleworking, telework, online work.

Tags are essential when working with many pages, when you don't remember where you wrote some bit of information. Click My Pages on the sidebar and you will see a list of pages and tags you've created, by clicking on any tag you can show just pages marked with it.

Backpack contains bits of help in most pages. You will see some tips on using tags when adding them and a link with more information on what a tag is. In most cases you won't ever need this help, everything is very intuitive.

Below the page title there's a row with the elements you can add to a page. The first link, Edit Body, is used to describe what the page contains..

List is the function I use the most. Click it and start naming the list (e.g. “things to ask the client in meeting”) and then adding items (e.g. “what's is your main product?”, “last year's sales?”, etc). Later, as you complete the items on your list, you can check them off.

You can edit the list name and any item just by clicking edit to the left. I like the reorder function, at the bottom of the list, which allows you to drag and drop items. You remove items and whole lists as easily.

The Notes option is used for including free form text, consult the Text Formatting link at the bottom of the page to know how to include special elements like bold text, tables, in line images and links. You can include as many notes as you need in any page.

The Files and Images options are available in the paid plans of Backpack. They allow uploading additional information to your pages, like images in a page of logo samples or spreadsheet files in a budget planning page.

Links allow you to interconnect pages. When you add a link from one page to another, a reciprocal link is created, then you can move between related pages faster.

Writeboards are documents that can track changes, revert to past revisions and compare them. I use them for writing and reviewing articles with other colleagues. It's a useful tool for collaboration.

There's a final link in the top of each page: Sharing. It's used for making your pages public or accessible by a few others.

Use the reminders to alert you of meetings or things to do via email or with a message to your mobile phone. 37 Signals included very simple selections like Later Today and Tomorrow Morning to help you setting reminders fast, a nice touch for people in a hurry.

Most functions in Backpack can be managed by email: every Backpack page shows a unique email address at the bottom, you can add elements by sending a message to that address. For example, to add a note, write “note: Ideas for dinner” as subject and put the content in the body of the message. Find more instructions using the help link at the bottom of each Backpack page.

For the geeks among us, there's a set of instructions, an API, for integrating Backpack's features with other web based applications. A web developer could use these instructions for adding or editing information in a Backpack's page from another website.

If you use Firefox I'd suggest using Backpack pages, an extension to add links to your pages in the toolbar, saving some minutes a day.

There was a time when we weren't as connected as today, we wanted to have all data in our hard disk, now information should be globally accessible, we have access to the Internet almost everywhere and there's no reason for taking gigabytes of information with us when we can keep it online.

Web based email services started the trend, applications like Backpack were next and now we have word processors and spreadsheets running online.

So, get online and start living in a connected world, I think it's just the way it should be.

Note: I'm using my affiliate link to Backpack in this article. If you prefer, you can use a link without affiliate code.