Hey guys. Long-time Backpack and Basecamp user. Love your stuff.

I have a very simple feature request that would keep me coming back to Backpack even more…

Throughout the day, I come upon links from friends, family, or just by surfing. I can’t read them at that specific time, so I save them for later. The dinosaur way is through the bookmarks manager in the browser (I use Camino). The semi-new way is through social bookmarking sites, like Magnolia or Delicious. Both of those have no interest because I really only care to browse for myself, and I’m sure many people are the same way.

A new idea recently came out by the maker of Tumblr called Instapaper; I’m sure you’ve probably heard of it. Funny thing is I made a Rails app for myself doing the same exact function—it took about a full Saturday afternoon to build it out in Rails.

It would be fantastic, though, if there was some way Backpack could get a system to save URLs via a bookmarklet. Before I made this rails app for myself, I used to copy the URL, open up Backpack, find my “URLs for later” note, and paste it in there. Too many steps compared to a nice little favlet.

If you ask me, Backpack is a perfect place to utilize this functionality and I know I personally would comeback and use Backpack even more.

What do you think?

Agreed. This would be a great feature, but it seems unlikely to make it. kgosser, any chance you’d be willing to save me a Saturday afternoon and share the source for your version?

Could this be done with some JavaScript code to use the API? Add an Item to a List on a specific page with this call . Maybe setup one list to be your “catch all” and move your links later on?

Maybe when I get more free time (haha, yea right), I’ll give this a try.

Interesting thought, Core.B. I haven’t looked into the API myself, and maybe when I get some free time (agreed, that’s laughable) I’ll look into this as well. It’ll be my first contribution to the Backpack world!

If you have a mac, you can use this Applescript ( you’ll need to get your API key & manually get the list of pages following the instructions at http://www.backpackit.com/api/—fortunately curl comes standard with os x)

tell application “Safari”

set url_current to URL of front document as text

end tell

set theScript to “curl -H ‘Content-Type: application/xml’ -d \”<request><token>your-backpack-api-key-here</token><item><content>” & url_current & “</content></item></request>\” http://username.backpackit.com/ws/page/id-of-your-target-page/items/add“

do shell script theScript

http://www.backpackit.com/api/ is the old version of the API. http://developer.37signals.com/backpack/ is the new version. I don’t know if the old url still works or not but I know some things broke with their last API update. They are working on updating the API page again , and hopefully they’ll redirect the old URL to the new one.

The call to add a new item to a list would be http://username.backpackit.com//ws/page/#{page_id}/lists/#{list_id}/items/add

I don’t use Mac, so you’re script doesn’t help me, but hopefully it can help the kgosser.