> Writing Tools and Workflow

I've just discovered Nick Wynja's Hack/Make blog and it's really quite good.

This article in particular is excellent. The apps may be different, but Nick's approach mirrors mine in a lot of ways. I was particularly interested in this part of the section on blogging:

For link posts, I have a script that I'm continuously running on my server to make creating drafts from links really easy....The script will parse the info from Pinboard and within a second, create a properly formatted Markdown file in my Drafts folder.

I find links all the time that I want to share here, but I always end up forgetting to do it. By the time I remember I usually feel like the link is old news and scrap it. On the day I read this piece I had spent about an hour setting up a similar system for getting links out of Pinboard using IFTTT, Dropbox, Hazel and a Python/AppleScript hybrid. And even then it didn't actually create the draft for me (although I was planning on adding that functionality eventually) it just created a reminder in the Reminders app telling me to write the post.

I took Nick's script and modified it to create drafts in the format Pelican requires1. I'm also using launchd instead of cron because sometimes it's just easier to go along with the way Apple wants you to do things. But in the end, it lowers the friction level of posting here and that's a Good ThingĀ®.


  1. Thanks for writing it in Python, Nick 

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