From an email I just sent out:

“I’m building a robotic marionette (see http://www.delamaquina.com). The couple times I’ve shown it off in public, it is fascinating to watch reactions — first, people notice this creepy puppet moving around… then inevitably, their eyes travel up the strings and see this machine with spinning pulleys and wires. They stare at this device, mesmerized by the motion and peering all around it to see how it fits together. THEN, after a few minutes, they notice I’m standing off to the side, pushing buttons and working sensors to make the puppet move… that’s when the conversation begins, “OH! you’re controlling it by that computer! How does it work?” or “What does this mean for puppetry?” or “Who’s controlling whom?”

So maybe “Technology is just another art medium through which emotion can be expressed?”

Indeed, I think that’s becoming my own unresolved question: can we coax expressiveness out of technology, itself?”

The applescript in this post will take the currently selected headline or tabbed article in NetNewsWire, prompt the user for tags about the article, and then create an HTML copy of the article in DEVONThink in a sub group.

If the first tag is not the word “private” then the link is also posted, via cocoalicious, to my del.icio.us account.

This was based on my prior script and Ethan’s attempt to deal with info overload.

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.

This is attached to a Quicksilver trigger (CMD-CTR-OPTION-/).

Here is the workflow:

• SCAN: Quickly scan headlines in NetNewsWire and hit return when I see a headline that seems interesting. This opens the page in the background in a tab in NNW
• READ: Go down list of articles, skim them, do CMD-CTR-OPTION-/ for those I’d like to possibly include in future research to invoke my script. * In the prompt that appears, type a few keywords/tags that describe the content and hit “return”
• REVIEW: Later on, when doing research or work around a topic, I can use DEVONThink’s smart searching features confidently knowing that it will dig up at least some interesting connections between articles I saved.

Things to do:

• add a growl notification saying “successful import”
• 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?

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set destination_group_location to "/url/delicious/"
 
tell application "NetNewsWire"
	set userInput to text returned of (display dialog "Enter Tag:" default answer "untagged")
 
	set h_tags to userInput
 
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to space
	set h_tags to h_tags's text items
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {""}--> restore delimiters'
 
	try
		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 h_title to (get item tabnum of tabtitles)
			set h_mdate to get current date
			set h_when to current date
 
		else if exists selectedHeadline then
			set h_URL to URL of selectedHeadline
			set h_title to title of selectedHeadline
			set h_mdate to get current date
			if exists date published of selectedHeadline then
				set h_when to date published of selectedHeadline
			else
				set h_when to date arrived of this_headline
			end if
		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
 
	tell application "DEVONthink Pro"
		if item 1 of h_tags is "private" then
			set destination_group_location to destination_group_location & item 2 of h_tags
		else
			set destination_group_location to destination_group_location & item 1 of h_tags
		end if
 
		if not (exists record at destination_group_location) then
			set destination_group to create location destination_group_location
		else
			set destination_group to get record at destination_group_location in current database
		end if
 
		set archive to create record with {name:h_title, type:html, creation date:h_when, modification date:h_mdate, URL:h_URL, comment:userInput} in destination_group
		set source of archive to download markup from h_URL
 
	end tell
 
	tell application "Cocoalicious"
		if item 1 of h_tags is not "private" then
			make new post with properties {description:h_title, url:h_URL, tag string:userInput}
		end if
	end tell
 
end tell

Technorati Tags: applescript, devonthink, netnewswire

I was making a list of things I wanted to do with my personal website. Before SxSW I spent many hours getting the blog running mephisto, for no other reason than it’s written with Ruby on Rails. I wanted to eat my own dogfood, etc.

As I was looking at my list of blog enhancements I wanted to spend time building, I realized that the Wordpress community has already accomplished most of these items and that it would take me months if not years to reinvent those wheels w/ mephisto.

So, I had to make a decision. Was I in all of this to wrestle with my web publishing platform? Does “build mephisto plugins for a relatively small community” satisfy my life purpose.

No.

I’m also exploring some ideas after reading 4 hour workweek that would be much more quickly implemented via one-click installs of wordpress.

I visited the websites for a handful of people who are doing interesting work that I admire, secretly envy, and wish to become… not one of them was using mephisto, and most were using wordpress or blogger — that sealed the deal.

So wordpress it is.

There is some more work to be done:

• conversion of old posts to wordpress… I have many years of content to convert
• conversion of my davidnunez.com mephisto theme to wordpress template

I also feel like I have to play catchup to understand the architecture and development path of wordpress. Wading through plugins, alone, is going to be a daunting task.

I found some plugins I installed right away to help w/ using textmate as a blog management tool with tags (a la Ultimate Tag Warrior).