davidnunez.com » 365experiments

Iggy Loves his Bio-Mist

admin — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:16:24 +0000

This is my iguana (about 10" Snout to Vent, so about 2 years old) after he was spritzed with Bio-Mist, an aloe vera and cactus juice concoction that helps his skin. He’s molting now, so this is a look of pure joy.

Sometimes I wish I was an iguana.

Applescript to transform mail.app message to GTDAlt inbox item

admin — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 03:56:00 +0000

I’m currently using GTDAlt in TextMate as my GTD processing system. It’s a text based system, so it’s upgradable, portable, etc.

Through the TextMate bundle framework, you get some nice collating of contexts, etc.

GTDAlt does rely on some proprietary syntax, but it’s pretty basic and easily parsable.

There is rudimentary support for iterating through items in an inbox.txt file to generate GTD items.

I created an applescript which will take the selected message in Mail.app and create a properly formated item, using the subject and message: url (you must have MailTags installed so the message: protocol is recognized).

This means I’ll get action items with links to specific messages in my GTD system.

I partner this with a Mail Act-On rule… so when I hit ctrl-1, a GTDAlt item gets created, the message is tagged “@action”, and it’s sent to my one archive folder in one step.

In true GTD fashion, this should only be used for messages that take longer than 2 minutes to respond to. In reality, I need to get better at firing off quick responses to things (or liberally using the delete key). Otherwise, it’s likely I’ll use this to just procrastinate email items away into a black hole.

Download the script

Applescript that archives NetNewsWire post to DEVONThink Pro

admin — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 17:01:00 +0000

As a refinement to an earlier script I posted, I made some modifications to my suggested news reading workflow.

The applescript in this post will take the currently selected article in NetNewsWire, prompt the user for tags about the article, and then create a web archive of the article in DEVONThink.

It attaches the referral URL to the DEVONThink record, so when it creates the archive, it will actually fetch the article from the original source (ex. del.icio.us posts get the original article)

Since DEVONThink doesn’t really do tags, I’ve co-opted the “comments” field for this purpose.

I’ve attached this script to a hotkey using Red Sweater’s FastScripts (cmd-ctr-option-/) Of course, a more hipster way to do this might be to consider quicksilver triggers.

Here is the workflow:

Quickly scan headlines in NetNewsWire and do CMD-CTR-OPTION-/ when I see a headline I’d like to possibly include in future research
In the prompt that appears, type a few keywords/tags that describe the content and hit “return”
Later on, when doing research or work around a topic, I can use DEVONThink confidently knowing that it will dig up at least some interesting connections between articles I saved.

Note: if the article is something that I think I would want to read immediately, I can either tag it with “@read” or hit return in NNW to pop it up in a browser window. In the latter case, it’s critical that I seperate the *scanning* mode from the *reading* mode. I accomplish this by setting a timer (say 15 minutes per day) where I’m just scanning headlines for read-immediates or archivable articles and another timer for my reading stuff. From my browser, I can go on to create archives if I determine it’s worth saving.

Things to do

add a growl notification saying “successful import”
in DEVONThink, use the @read tag somehow to generate a reading list or printable digest of articles
write a looping script that will handle the few hundred articles marked as “flagged” in NNW by archiving them. What would the tags be here?

tell application "NetNewsWire" try if exists selectedHeadline then set h_comment to text returned of (display dialog "Enter Tags:" default answer "") set this_headline to selectedHeadline set h_mdate to get current date set h_title to title of this_headline set h_note to description of this_headline if exists date published of this_headline then set h_when to date published of this_headline else set h_when to date arrived of this_headline end if set h_URL to URL of this_headline set h_note to "

dorkbot-sxsw wrap-up

admin — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 19:16:07 +0000

I just posted the dorkbot6 wrapup.

Displaying tags on mephisto

admin — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 05:06:12 +0000

The mephisto liquid tags, drops, and filters are not very well documented. You have to look in the source code (specifically drop_filters.rb) to discover what’s available.

I was able to add rendering of tags/keywords by using:

{{article | linked_tag_list}}

in my template.

Applescript to import NNW smart folder into Yojimbo

admin — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 03:14:32 +0000

Today I modified this script which facilitates Yojimbo importing from NetNewsWire

I’ve set up a smart folder in NetNewsWire that grabs the latest 50 flagged headlines from any feed.

I needed this script because I had a technorati watch feed for dorkbot and I wanted to collect blog mentions to send around. I was just flagging articles that mentioned dorkbot-austin and wanted to export a list of bookmarks.

With this, the workflow is now:

Quickly scan headlines in NetNewsWire and do CMD-Shift-L to flag interesting content.
Run this script on the smart folder (this creates a web archive in Yojimbo of each of these articles and removes the flag on the headline in NetNewsWire)
Over time, spend a few minutes working down the list of archived articles in Yojimbo and tag/delete them further as necessary.

Potential problem: This makes it really easy to procrastinate making decisions on what to read and what to do with what I read. Following this strategy will lead to a large pile of unsorted links which I’ll very likely will never find the time to sort through.

I think DEVONThink does a better job of scanning and grouping incoming pieces of text.

I should probably rewrite this to send flagged content directly to DEVONThink. Then, instead of queueing up a long list of articles to read, I’ll let DEVONThink suggest articles for me to read as I do research. Anything that I think I’d want to read immediately I could tag with “@Read” or something similar.

    tell application "NetNewsWire"
        try
            set userInput to text returned of (display dialog "Enter Tag:" default answer "untagged")
            set oldDelims to AppleScript's text item delimiters
            set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {", ", ","}
            set h_tags to text items of userInput
            set AppleScript's text item delimiters to oldDelims
            if (index of selected tab is not 0) then
                set tabnum to index of selected tab + 1
                set taburls to URLs of tabs
                set h_URL to (get item tabnum of taburls)
                set tabtitles to titles of tabs
                set newItemTitle to (get item tabnum of tabtitles)
                tell application "Yojimbo"
                    --set newItem to make new bookmark item with properties {name:newItemTitle, location:h_URL}
                    set newItem to make new web archive item with contents h_URL
                    add tags h_tags to newItem
                    set flagged of newItem to true
                    set isFlagged of h to false
                end tell
            else if exists selectedSubscription then
                repeat with h in headlines of selectedSubscription
                    set h_URL to URL of h
                    set h_title to title of h
                    set isFlagged of h to false
                    tell application "Yojimbo"
                        --set newItem to make new bookmark item with properties {name:h_title, location:h_URL}
                        set newItem to make new web archive item with contents h_URL
                        add tags h_tags to newItem
                        set flagged of newItem to true
                    end tell
                end repeat
            else
                error "No headline is selected."
            end if
        on error error_message number error_number
            if the error_number is not -128 then
                try
                    display alert "NetNewsWire" message error_message as warning
                on error number error_number
                    if error_number is -1708 then display dialog error_message buttons {"OK"} default button 1
                end try
            end if
        end try
    end tell

Hack to get all posts with Textmate/Blogging Fetch

admin — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 01:24:55 +0000

UPDATE (2007.03.20.084041): Don’t do this. It’s an awful hack and will grind your computer to a halt.

I want to hack the textmate blogging bundle to do a full download of all posts in a blog and save those posts to local disk.

First, I just hacked the bundle to allow user to fetch any post from the blog.

Note: This is a slow hack and should only sparingly be used.

Knud M√∂ller talks about using XMLRPC to get all posts from a blog. I opted to use the “number of post requests is ridiculously large” approach. Mephisto implements the GetRecentPost call with a limit indicating number of posts to retrieve, so it’s still only one database hit (but creates a whole lot more objects in memory).



/Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/Blogging.tmbundle/Support/lib/blogging.rb

def fetch
   begin
     # Makes sure endpoint is determined and elements are parsed
     current_password = self.password
     require "#{ENV['TM_SUPPORT_PATH']}/lib/progress.rb"
     result = nil
     TextMate.call_with_progress(:title => "Fetch Post", :message => "Contacting Server ‚Äú#{@host}‚Äù‚Ä¶") do
       result = self.client.getRecentPosts(self.blog_id, self.username, current_password, 100000) # HERE IS WHERE YOU SPECIFY NUMBER OF POSTS TO RETRIEVE
     end
     if !result || !result.length
       TextMate.exit_show_tool_tip("No posts are available!")
     end
     @mw_success = true
     if self.post = select_post(result)
       TextMate.exit_create_new_document(post_to_document())
     else
       TextMate.exit_discard
     end
   rescue XMLRPC::FaultException => e
     TextMate.exit_show_tool_tip("Error retrieving posts. Check your configuration and try again.")
   end
end

This works fine. Next up:

Create a separate command for Fetch latest 20 and Fetch All
Create command to “create index listing”
Create command to “Fetch All Posts and then save each post to separate file in specified directory”