If you’re someone who manages a lot of Basecamp accounts and has a hard time remembering passwords, this post is for you.

There are a lot of authentication systems emerging, Facebook, Twitter, and Google all allow apps to let users login using their credentials.  Open ID is an open authentication system that a variety of providers operate.  It’s a godsend if you “can’t remember your passwords? tired of filling out registration forms?”

I have a lot (12, precisely) of Basecamp accounts.  We run it for Flatsourcing, and I’m pulled into a lot of client’s accounts.  I used to have to remember the URL, username, & password for each one.  That’s 36 things to remember, and countless combination of things.

Now I just remember a single URL and password with OpenID.  It’s awesome.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Create an Open ID.  I use myOpenID.  There are a lot of providers.
• Log into Basecamp and click “my info” in the upper right.
• In the area for your username & password, click “Use OpenID” and enter yours
• When you land on the login screen, click “Login using an OpenID instead” and enter yours
• You’ll be taken to your Open ID provider to enter your password and then voilà, you’re in
• HUGE BONUS - Basecamp has an “Open Bar” that is a drop down of all your Basecamp accounts (actually all your 37 Signal product accounts).  These are all now connected and easy to switch back and forth between.  This feature alone makes switching to OpenID for authentication well worth it.  That and you have 36 memory slots freed up.

Enjoy!

In our daily work we usually use Basecamp (BC) for communication on projects and Lighthouse (LH) for tasks & bugs tracking. I’m sure you know how BC and LH rocks, so I will tell you how to integrate BC time tracking feature with LH tickets.

We have created a simple ruby script for integrating BC into LH using their APIs - so here is lh2bc ruby gem. Lh2Bc creates projects and tickets created in LH as to-do lists and to-do items in the BC accordingly, so you can track work time in the BC’s to-dos in a simple way.

Lh2Bc can

• create new BC to-do lists, when new LH projects appears
• create new BC to-do items, when new LH tickets appears
• mark as completed BC to-do item if LH ticket is closed
• associate BC user with LH user

How to use

• if you being a developer spend some time working on some ticket, just specify these hours in the associated BC to-do item.
• various developers can specify hours for the same ticket.
• at the end of the week you can create BC time report and find who is the best rock star in your company for this week

Installation

• sudo gem install fs-lh2bc -s https://gems.gihub.com
• setup Lighthouse and Basecamp sections in the config.yml
• setup association between LH and BC users in the users.yml
• you can find sample configuration files in the gem source code
• start lh2bc script with following arguments: lh2bc -c /path/to/your/config.yml -u /path/to/your/users.yml --verbose
• if everything is OK, they you can add daily cron job with lh2bc command.

Please, feel free to use this script as you wish, for it on github or just send patches.