If you haven’t been hanging out in the BatchBook Developers Forum, you might not have heard about our recent API updates. We’ve overhauled the API to make it even easier for programmers to integrate their applications with BatchBook. Just as importantly, the documentation for the API. Check it out at http://developer.batchblue.com/.
BatchBook has had an API for some time now, but these updates really make it ready for prime time. While this news only directly affects programmers, we’ll all benefit from the resulting integrations between BatchBook and other awesome tools. A recent post on ProgrammableWeb extolled the business case for APIs, and we’ve been supporting the same ideas via the Small Business Web.
As usual, this update to BatchBook wouldn’t have been as good without the involvement of some of our awesome users. Several folks in the Developers Forum have been giving great feedback and helping other developers get started with the API. I’d like to especially recognize Andrew Flusche and guedalia, who have been contributing sample PHP code for other users to use freely. Thanks again, guys!
We’re really excited to see what great things you all will build with the BatchBook API. I hope to see you in the Developers Forum if you have any questions or just want to show off what you’re working on.
Last week, I posted about our recent flurry of updates to BatchBook. After a weekend to play with some of the new changes, there’s one I really love. It’s the List widget on the Dashboard.
And we love to give props where props are due. So, yet again, that was a recommendation that came from the forums. In this case, forum user Barbara Ballard asked:
Inspired by the Marketing dashboard widget … I created “Barbara’s list”. It’s all current clients, alumni, leads, projects assigned to me. It’s who I should be thinking about this week, who I should pay attention to. … Now I want it on my dashboard.
We had been talking about doing a saved search widget. But when Barbara recommended putting Lists on the Dashboard, an bell went off in my head. First of all, Lists are already part of BatchBook. This would put something on the Dashboard that just about everybody is already using in their account. Nothing new to learn. Instant gratification. Secondly, a saved search is best handled as a list anyway. That way it will always update, always be accessible, always be exportable, etc.
It was the perfect solution.
Thank you, Barbara, for your excellent recommendation!
I love getting neat BatchBook usage tips from our users. This happened again over the weekend as Andrewshared with us (via the BatchBook Forums) how he’s using FireFox 3’s “Awesome Bar” to quickly search for contacts in BatchBook.
Now that I have all my data in BatchBook, I wanted a quick way to pull up a contact. Thanks to Firefox and the Delicious.com extension, I have it!
(If you don’t know, Delicious.com is a great bookmarking application. It handles all my bookmarks. And there’s a handy Firefox extension.)
Be sure you have the Delicious extension installed. Then you can right click in the BB contact search box (upper right of any BB screen). Select “Add a keyword for this search in Delicious.” Then you can fill out the bookmark details and enter a keyword that will invoke the search.
Now I can search my contacts directly from the Firefox Awesome Bar. I just type “bb smith” and hit enter. Voila!
So, in summary, entering “bb darowski” into the address bar would automatically run a BatchBook search for “darowski” and take you to the results. Nifty! I immediately set this up and found it super useful. I then realized you don’t even need the Delicious extension to set it up.
Here’s how you can set this up for yourself:
Step 1: Right click (or control+click) on the search field in BatchBook. Choose “Add a Keyword for this Search”.
Step 2: Name your search and give it a shortcut (I’m using “bb”).
Step 3: Enter your search string. Entering “bb darowski” searches BatchBook for “darowski”.
The lawn needs mowing and the Red Sox are on a winning streak, so that can only mean one thing… it’s spring! We have a bunch of cool things under development (if I do say so myself), but before we start adding more to BatchBook, we felt it was time to do a little spring cleaning. The community over at the BatchBlue Forums has helped us so much along the way that we consider it an additional team member. For that reason, we’re giving the forum users a sneak peek at the updates we’re making.
If you’re a forum user, we’d love to hear your feedback. If you’re not a forum user yet, we’d love to welcome you to the community. As forum user Kenny recently said:
One of the key benefits BB is becoming for me is an excellent source of tips on new or emerging web sites / services that I hadn’t been aware of previously, via users on this forum.
This is great! Thanks all for participating on this board
We’ve been busy these past few weeks hooking up on the backend with many of our favorite web services for small businesses. One of our favorites is FreshBooks, the professional invoicing and time tracking tool.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, then a screencast must be worth at least a thousand and six. Here’s Adam’s latest screencast explaining how the integration works. HINT: It’s way cool.
We’ve been long-time customers of FreshBooks and really love both the product and the company. We hope this integration will make it easier for you to manage all of your contacts and view their invoices from one place. Here’s a post on the FreshBooks blog talking about the integration as well.
