An Easy Technique For Decluttering Your Campfire Room
Strong and constant communication is key to good software development, and we use a variety of tools to make sure we're always in sync. Two tools that we've found incredibly useful are Campfire and the Propane client.
We lean heavily on our Campfire bot – he tells us about every commit, every story change, every deployment, and every tweet about us. This constant flow of information is great, but we do need to worry about modulating our signal-to-noise ratio. The key is making sure information is readily available without getting in the way of actual conversations.
Our Campfire Room
…before… (robot name hidden for Security™)
…after…
Much better! We've hidden the name entirely, and toned down all of the robot messages. It's easy to accomplish this clarity through some simple adjustments to the ~/Library/Application Support/Propane/styles/cf_chat.css file:
/* ~/Library/Application Support/Propane/styles/cf_chat.css */
/* Begin Local Changes */
tr.text_message.message.user_1059572 * {
font-family:Helvetica ! important;
color: gray !important;
font-size: 0.9em;
}
tr.text_message.message.user_1059572 .person .author { display: none; }
div.col table.chat tr.pending td.body {
background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABAAAAAQCAYAAAAf8/9hAAADO2lDQ1BJQ0MgUHJvZmlsZQAAeAGFlEto1FAUhv+MKYK0gqi1FpTgQou0JT7QilDbabXWkXEY+9AiyDRzZxpNMzGZGR+ISEHc+VqKGx+IiyriQrpQcKULkULra1EEcaUiiEI3Usb/Ju1MKlYvJPlyzn/P64YAVQ9TjmNFNGDYzrvJrqh26PCAtngCVahBNbhShue0JxL7faZWPuev6bdQpGWyScaK9R2Y+LRt9f1Lj2Lv6572+p75+nlvNS4TAopG64pswFslDwa8V/LJvJOn5ohkYyiVJjvkRrcn2UG+QV6aDfFgiNPCM4CqNmpyhuMyTmQFuaVoZGXMUbJup02bPCXtac8Ypob9Rn7IWdDGlY8BrWuARS8rtgEPGL0LrFpfsTXUASv7gbEtFdvPpD8fpXbcy2zZ7IdTqqOs6UOp9HM9sPgaMHO1VPp1q1Sauc0crOOZZRTcoq9lYcorIKg32M34yTlaiIOefFULcJNz7F8CxC4A1z8CGx4Ayx8DiRqgZwci59lucOXFKc4F6Mg5p10zO5TXNuv6dq2dRyu0bttobtRSlqX5Lk9zhSfcokg3Y9gqcM7+WsZ7tbB7D/LJ/iLnhLd7lpWRdKqTs0Qz2/qSFp27yY3kexlzTze5gddUxt3TG7Cy0cx39wQc6bOtOM9FaiJ19mD8AJnxFdXJR+U8JI94xYMypm8/ltqXINfTnjyei0lNLfe2nRnq4RlJVqwzQx3xWX7tFpIy7zpq7jiW/82ztshzHIYFARM27zY0JNGFKJrgwEUOGXpMKkxapV/QasLD8b8qLSTKuywquvCZez77e06gwN0yfh+icYw0liNo+jv9m/5Gv6nf0b9eqS80VDwj7lHTGL/8nXFlZlmNjBvUKOPLmoL4Bqttp9dCltZhXkFPXlnfFK4uY1+pL3s0mUNcjE+HuhShTE0YZDzZtey+SLb4Jvx8c9kWmh61L84+qavkeqOOHZmsfnE2XA1r/7OrYNKyq/DkjZAuPGuhrlU3qd1qi7oDmrpLbVNb1U6+7VT3l3f0clYmTrJul9Wn2ION0/RWTroyWwT/Fn4x/C91CVu4pqHJf2jCzWVMS/iO4PYfd0j5L/wNAYUVDXxLOzsAAAAJcEhZcwAACxMAAAsTAQCanBgAAADbSURBVDgRzZKxDgFBEIZPo9QqNCLxBkq12htcotR5Apd4DQ9AvINKqUaiuFyBB6AgCN/vdht7mxXV/cm3czszO3PZnSgqo2r81AR2cIMDzKADQbXJSOEFe1jAEu6GIVZKPuvXUmW/BXWNoQJWTT7W8IQ5qIGjAR4FRk4kd9QxF1BOYYE8zb8m5uDfBfylTcRWlk2C2QUJtsC0IPaTSwWucISG54QuWHm6cEdjPD14QAZdsNKTxqAn3oCe3Ks+kTOo0wo0TBoq7VPQsAXVIkN3cQJ11VhrvDXmJdMbt8wz9H7b5IAAAAAASUVORK5CYII=) ! important;
background-repeat:no-repeat ! important;
background-position:right ! important;
}
/* End Local Changes */
/* ... rest of cf_chat.css file ... */
We can target our robot by inspecting the DOM (thank you, Safari Developer Tools), in order to determine his user id. In our case, his messages are all tagged with the class user_1059572.
The background property is a great trick as well – it shows an animated sync icon next to any message that hasn't yet made it up to the servers. While campfire is much more reliable than it once was, actually knowing when a message has hit is incredibly helpful.
Keeping Everyone in Sync
The final touch is to unify these tweaks for everyone on the team. We all share a single Dropbox folder, which makes this absolutely trivial:
cd "~/Library/Application Support/Propane/styles"
ln -s "~/Dropbox/Thunderbolt Labs/Propane/cf_chat.css" .
Let us know of any helpful rules you've added to your cf_chat.css file, and we'll add them here as well!
*Keep it real, we'll erase shit we don't like.* comments powered by Disqus
