Creating smo.ulder.in to export campfire transcripts

Recently, I needed to export a lot of stuff from campfire – about 6 months worth of chats. We used Campfire to host our daily huddle chats whilst we were developing an internal product with Pollenizer recently. They decided to depreciate the service, and I was still keen to get the notes from that for posterity.

However, I was disappointed to find that Campfire didn’t support a bulk export function, only the ability to download the notes from each days sessions.

I had a bit of a hunt around, and luckily found Emil’s response to a different thread post on the Campfire forums. I’ve recently turned my hand to trying to learn and use the programming language, Ruby on Rails. But this was still beyond me, so I headed to the Inspire9 Yammering community and asked there if anyone was able to take up the challenge.

The Inspire9 Yammering community contains some of the best Ruby guys in Australia, not to mention some of my best friends, and it’s a good example of what you can achieve using the Yammering system. Whilst we don’t all specifically work for Inspire9, we certainly do all belong in that community.

Much to my pleasure and thanks, Ben Hoskings and Pat Allan took up the challenge! You can see the conversation here…

Soon, Pat and Ben had a solution for a script that would export all the info I needed, which you can see here.

After all of this, I felt like it was a great opportunity to build the app into something anyone could use, rather than just those blessed with the ability to write Ruby code. So I commissioned Pat to build out the script into an application that would allow someone to export all of their campfire rooms.

And now, not even two weeks after the initial question – we have the solution! Let me introduce you to http://smo.ulder.in, an app anybody can use to export all their conversations, attachments and knowledge out of a campfire account.