We are big fans of 37 Signals’ products, specifically Basecamp. The most common request we get from our clients using Basecamp is that they never know when to-do list items are complete. Enter Nourish.

If you have followed our blog, you know we recently launched an RSS to email service called Nourish. Because 37 Signals builds every product they have with RSS feeds, it makes Nourish a perfect vehicle to deliver updates for our clients automatically.

Here is how we have ‘mashed up’ Nourish + Basecamp to provide a better service for our clients who don’t regularly subscribe to RSS feeds. Follow these simple steps:

1. Sign up for a free Nourish account.
2. Set up a campaign called Basecamp Updates
3. Grab the RSS feed from Basecamp
4. Make a list of people who should get the updates
5. Set the delivery for daily (you can do weekly or monthly)

Now our clients get updates daily with what items have been completed. No more emails asking, “Is this done yet?”. Can you digg it?

We hope you find the Nourish + Basecamp mashup useful. We are always interested in creative ways our clients use our products. If you are using Nourish to in a unique way, we’d love to hear about it. Submit your Nourish Mashup today!

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One of the nice things about Ruby on Rails is it’s use of convention over configuration. The idea is that if you follow common conventions, everything just kind of falls into place for you. We adopted many RESTful conventions a while ago, and have been reaping the benefits ever since. However, one thing we, and many others, have noticed with our shiny new RES Tful-style controllers is that they begin to look a little repetitive. This leaves us with a great opportunity to begin extracting these repetitive bits to help DRY up our code.

CurrentResource is a Ruby on Rails plugin which creates some nice convenience methods to access the current resource being referenced in the request URI when you follow common RES Tful conventions.

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