malanciault.com

Lately, a few people have been asking me how to format messages and writeboards on Basecamp. As you may know, Basecamp supports Textile  formatting which is a wiki-like format. It allows to easily format messages and Writeboards. You simply need to learn a few basic syntax elements.

I have found two interesting cheat sheets explaining the syntax you need to know to be able to quickly format text in Basecamp. I’ll give you the link at the end of this post, but, for the sake of  “getting things done” , here is what I think you need to know. In fact, I use Basecamp on a daily basis and those are the only elements I’m using, 99% of the time: displaying links and lists.

Display a link

To display a link, simply use the following syntax: “text”:link. Here is an example:

My professional blog is “here”:http://malanciault.com.

In Basecamp, the previous would be displayed exactly like this:

My professional blog is here.

Display lists

To display bullet list or numbered list, simply us * or #. Here is an example:

* bullet item 1

* bullet item 2

* bullet item 3

# number 1

# number 2

# number 3

The previous would be displayed like this:

bullet item 1

bullet item 2

bullet item 3

number 3

number 1

number 2

That’s it! For more comprehensive syntax elements, have a look at these two interesting cheat sheets:

• http://warpedvisions.org/projects/textile-cheat-sheet/
• http://www.tildemark.com/at-work/formating-messages-in-basecamp-using-textile.html