I never expected to see that little note pop up in my account. I’ve created 100 pages! Since July!! And, I don’t even use it for work—that’s all personal stuff!!!

I don’t know whether to be proud or horrified at the amount of information I seem to “require”. (And let me tell you, that’s probably less than half of it.)

What do I use Backpack for? What don’t I use Backpack for? I’m going to go scan my list of pages and give you some examples.

• A page for each of my blogs and sites. Each page then links to various sub-pages that include everything from the technical information and design specs to potential content to reference material or links to things that might be useful someday.

• A series of pages shared with a long-distance friend, where we can “chat” by leaving notes for each other, referencing links, images, etc.. It’s great to be able to write down that funny little thing while you’re thinking it or mention the weird web page you just found before you forget all about it. It feels like we’re a lot closer—kind of like passing notes in school. :)

• A “shopping” page, with a list of links to other pages. Some are big comparison pages, with lots of notes, links, and images. Others are lists of stores and sites—a page for antique stores, for example, or a page for great shoe sites. (I keep my list of all the random things that I want over at Wists. It’s just faster than having to cut-and-paste links to all those little pictures.) I also have a page full of links to discount and coupon listings, and when I get one of those special offers from a store (or a site like Backpack), I post it there, so I don’t lose track of it.

• A “creative” page with links to other pages, like my image library (stuff I see that I might want to use for arts and crafts projects later on), which is actually several pages, a page that links to art project ideas, another page with a list of links to sewing ideas, each on their own page, complete with images, directions, etc..

• Things like this, where I’ve done research for something or somebody. I want them to be able to see it, and if it’s something that might be useful to someone else, I make it public.

• A page titled “Dear Dr.,” where I make notes about changes in my health or write down questions I want to remember to share. (I’m recovering from breast cancer and have a few other problems, so it’s good to collect it all in one place and not have to think about it again.) It winds up being a sort of diary (albeit not every day) of my status, and I think it really helps to be able to see what’s really going on over time. It’s certainly more informative than my sitting in the doctor’s office, saying, “Oh, I’m fine, thanks. How are you?”

• And, of course, pages of odd stuff I want to save. One of them is a list of quotes, one is a list of my favorite words, one is a list of links to funny stuff that I’ll occasionally dig through and share when somebody’s having a bad day, etc.. You get the idea.

• A page of links to blogging software and resources. A page of links to Web development sites, software, tutorials, and whatever else. A page of all the domains I own (with notes about their registrar, status, what they’re pointing at, and so forth), all the domains I might like to own, and all the domains I want that somebody else currently owns, plus a list of links to registrars and a list of links to other domain references.

• A “creative writing” page that leads to a bunch of Writeboards that will never make me famous but make me happy in the meantime.

• A bunch of random, personal pages, including one of pictures of haircuts I like, one of images I’m considering for a wall mural, etc.. I even made a page, just like a 13 year-old girl would, of all the boyfriends I’ve had. :) Sadly, I’m a ways from 13, so the memory isn’t what it used to be: there are two I can’t remember! Yeah, it’s silly, and no one cares (not even me, really) but it was fun.

And , of course, there’s more. But I think I noticed your eyes glazing over a few bullets back. Suffice it to say, I’m gradually migrating just about everything to Backpack (or Basecamp, where I’ve got one project for “divorce” and another for “bold new life”). Even my important stuff will be living at 37signals as soon as I can get it there.

At first I wasn’t sure exactly why I was doing it, except that I liked being able to group things and look at them all together. So much better than a thousand generic bookmarks. But then my new computer (UMPC) turned out to be a lemon, and its replacement died of unknown causes, and I just got my third one today. Not only have I not had to transfer all the stuff on Backpack (twice!), but in the downtime in between exchanges, I was able to borrow anybody’s machine anywhere and get at my stuff.

It was so incredibly helpful that I just signed up for Highrise and plan to migrate all my contacts. Then Windows can crash all it wants—I’ll be 37signals-proofed!

Oh! I forgot to mention my two most-used pages!

• One is a bunch of lists of all my myriad accounts with their user names and passwords. I linked the titles right to the sites themselves, so I can just click and go. I need that page at least a few times each day.

• The other is my home page, where I keep my lists of things to do. One is daily-repetitive, one is weekly-repetitive, and one is just one-off odds and ends I don’t want to forget. The repetitive ones are my favorites, though. There are blogs I want to check every day, sites I want to check every morning to see if the hardware I want is available at a refurbed discount yet (gotta act fast!), etc.. I put links in them all, so it couldn’t be quicker to just click, click, click my way through. There are even things in that daily list that aren’t Web-related. (Unbelievable!) There are two really wonderful things about those lists on the home page. One, I run across them all day long, as my Backpack site stays up on my screen. And, even better, two, the daily and weekly lists are reuseable! I just unclick everything and start again. That is extremely cool.

I don’t know, guys. I realize I’m not talking rocket science (yet—just you wait ‘til I’m back on my feet!), but I think that’s my point. If Backpack can do all these things and be so beneficial for me, imagine all the incredible things it could do for you who have real lives! :) Soon, you’ll be ruling the universe!

kayels,

Is your “Things like this, where I’ve done research…” page public? It’s asking for a password. Thanks for this great list! I’m always looking for new ways to use my backpack.

Zane

Wow, kayels, thanks so much for sharing this! And many thanks for your passionate use of Backpack!

Wow, thats a lot of pages. I have 12 pages and use BP daily. :P

The “things like this” link should actually be http://kayels.backpackit.com/pub/1229338

Kayels (and others!)

I am not using Backpack to its potential, and I REALLY want to. Would you mind posting a screen shot of your home page or some other non-personal pages? It would help me so much, I just don’t know what to do with my homepage!

Thanks,
Anna

Kayels -

I’m trying to use Backpack to store my username/passwords for all my online accounts as well. How are you doing this – are you creating a table/grid for this? If so, you mind sharing how? I guess I can do it as a note, but it gets all messy – would like to implement some sort of table.

It would be nice to be able to upload simple spreadsheets or CSV files that are read as tables, huh? The formatting for tables is a little clumsy.

tippingrock/anna: if you want a great, great resource for how to effectively organize your homepage, you might want to take a look at
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen—the names of the various lists (and some options about how to use your pages) will pretty much jump out at you. I’ve only been using BP for a couple days, but it fits my organization (which is largely lifted from that book) very nicely.

Thanks for the note about the link, guys. I went back and fixed it.

I should add a really important use: FAVORITES / BOOKMARKS. I have a gazillion, and I’m gradually transferring all of them to appropriate topic pages in Backpack.

1. I can’t stand the visual mess that is the favorites / bookmarks function within browsers, Just looking at the list makes me want to close my eyes. And, I’m not thrilled with tags. They’re great for certain functions, but a little too uncertain for a perfectionist. I want to know I’ve seen all the options, not worry I might have missed some I tagged differently. I just want a good, easy to read, comprehensive list.

2. They go with me. No more, “Oh, I have that page marked at home…” They are wherever the Internet is. Talk about winning friends and influencing people!

3. I can reorder them, group them, add notes about them, stick pictures next to them, link them to other things, link other things to that page… Backpack turns my Favorites lists into actual, functional resources. How cool is that? And isn’t that what they’re supposed to be?

Just note that, while I say “list”, I don’t actually use the list function. Each Favorite / Bookmark is its own little note. The title is whatever makes sense to me, linked to the page, and the note’s body field is available for anything I might ever want to add.

A lot of them don’t need notes, but when notes are appropriate, they’re really beneficial. They don’t even have to be additional reference information. It could just be the date of the last time I visited the site, so I only have to look for things added since then. (That’s a big time-saver.) Or maybe I’m trying to learn something from that site, and the note’s body holds my, well, notes or a little summary. It makes it really easy to compare recommendations or information—it’s all on the one Backpack page. And, don’t forget, you can link from the text, as well.

It’s like my brain, only better!

kayels

I’m pretty new to Backpack but very pleased so far – and I’m racking up pages. Is there any way of organizing the pages? If you have 100 pages, do they all appear alphabetically down the right hand side of your screen? I was wondering how other folks organize their pages and if there is any way of doing it?

Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to this topic.

I’m certainly not perfect, but, for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to describe all of this as though I were :)

HOME PAGE

• Every Day
• Today
• Tomorrow
• This Week
• Next Week
• Soon
• Someday

Before closing up shop for the day, I uncheck the Every Day items, so the list is reconstituted for tomorrow, and I update Today, Tomorrow, and This Week. It doesn’t take nearly as long as it sounds. In fact, it’s two minutes of clarity and pride in accomplishment. We all could use that at the end of the day.

Sunday nights, I update Next Week, Soon, and Someday. It’s actually fun.

ACCOUNTS / USERNAMES & PASSWORDS

I keep track of both (1) usernames / passwords and (2) what personal data I’ve given each account. With a couple of mailing addresses, several phone numbers, a bunch of e-mail addresses, and a few credit cards to choose from, I’d never be able to remember what’s on which account. And, when I need to update a credit card or change an address, it’s as easy as going through the list to see who has the old one.

I used to do it in Outlook, creating a card for each site. But, when I wanted to change something, opening every card to look into the notes field was just too cumbersome. Looking down a Backpack page is a lot more efficient.

So, no I don’t use a chart. The information varies too much from account to account. I use notes for sites with a lot of information, mixed in with lists for groups with usernames, passwords, and little else. A couple of examples:

[in a list] 37signals
( ) Backpack: username / passwordhint (creditcardname)
( ) Backpack: otherusername / passwordhint (creditcardname)
( ) Basecamp: username / passwordhint (creditcardname)
( ) Highrise: username / passwordhint (creditcardname)
( ) and so on…

[in a list] Gmail
( ) publicemailname / passwordhint (fullname, yearofbith, state, alternateemailaddress, secret question? secret answer.)
( ) professionalemailname / passwordhint (fullname, yearofbith, state, alternateemailaddress, secret question? secret answer.)
( ) privateemailname / passwordhint (fullname, yearofbith, state, alternateemailaddress, secret question? secret answer.)

Of course, I write the links so they go straight to my login.

N.B., I know it isn’t traditionally proper, but I put spaces on either side of my slash/hash marks. Now that computers are all the rage, it’s the only way to ensure the text will break at the end of a line if it needs to.

How you group things depends on how you think about them. I recently morphed my 37signals group into several groups, kind of like this:

[in a list] Tumblelogs
( ) Backpack: username / passwordhint (creditcardname)
( ) Backpack: otherusername / passwordhint (creditcardname)
( ) Tumblr: username / passwordhint
( ) and so on…

[in a list] Project Management
( ) Basecamp: username / passwordhint (creditcardname)
( ) and so on…

Those are grouped by function, but I also group by category, for example:

[in a list] Web 2.0
( ) Del.icio.us: username / passwordhint
( ) Facebook: username / passwordhint
( ) LinkedIn: username / passwordhint
( ) and so on…

On the other hand, there are things that cry out to be recorded in notes. For example:

• Registered at GoDaddy 070815 [BTW, I write all my dates that way so they alphabetize properly, keeping my files in chronological order]: username / passwordhint (emailaddress, creditcardname, billingaddress city ST zipcode phonenumber, secret question? secret answer)
• Mailboxes created at GoDaddy: admin (primary), myname, yourname, and so on…
• Blog record pointed to TypePad 071004: username / passwordhint (emailaddress, creditcardname)

Or, since I have more than one account in some places, I might write it like this:

• selling: username / passwordhint (emailaddress, billingaddress city ST zipcode phonenumber, secretquestion? secretanswer.) uses paypal emailusername / passwordhint (billing address city ST zipcode phone number, secret question? secretanswer. secretquestion? secretanswer.)
• buying: username / passwordhint (emailaddress, billingaddress city ST zipcode phonenumber, secretquestion? secretanswer.) uses paypal emailusername / passwordhint (billing address city ST zipcode phone number, secret question? secretanswer. secretquestion? secretanswer.)
• nonprofit: username…

Yikes, I take up a lot of space with this stuff.

Tell you what. I’ll save this (the answers to the home page and account-managing) and come back in a bit with the answer to the navigation question.

Simon Hughes asked how I organize my pages. I posted the answer in “Organizing Your Pages” over in Tips & Tricks.