Campfire Integration Trick

We’ve been using Campfire for a few months, and here are some observations:

Integration trick.   We have notification hooks for posting into Campfire from various sources, such as Pivotal, Heroku, Github and Exceptional.   Here’s a neat trick - for each data source, create its own Campfire user.  For example, if our company name is “CBLUE”, so we created users called “Pivotal CBLUE”, “Github CBLUE”, etc. (Note that you’ll need to have a separate email address for each one.)  The benefit is that when each of these “users” posts to Campfire, the notice will show up with the first name of the “user” (e.g. “Pivotal”, “Github”)

This has been very useful to us as it gives a high-level view of the activity on our code.

Chat room.  The next step would be to move our discussion onto Campfire as well, following the example of companies like Github that have moved all their internal chat onto Campfire.  We tried to do the same…  but it was hard to change everyone’s habits, even after we installed a Mac client (Propane).  We ended up falling back to Google chat for instant messaging and our Facebook group for sharing content.  

Enter and Exit.  One problem is that every time someone enters or leaves the chat room, a message appears in Campfire… does anyone know how to turn this off?

You’ve got mail…   We would like to integrate one of our email accounts with Campfire so that a notification could be sent into Campfire whenever a new email arrived.  Does anyone know how to gmail account to be integrated with Campfire?  I couldn’t find a suitable way to make this happen… (I even considered trying to make the gmail inbox available as an RSS feed and then using SparkFlare to pull the RSS into Campfire…  but that didn’t work.)

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John