I get a lot of one-off requests for scripts and tips on how to handle tasks specific to people’s workflow or writing style. I generally keep myself pretty busy, so I usually reply with a quick idea or thought and leave it up to them to run with it. David Coleman emailed me this morning, though, with a request that struck me as an interesting enough idea to whip up a script before work.

What David wanted to do was take the idea behind my “Inline Links to References” command in the Markdown Service Tools and do something similar for footnotes, allowing him to write footnotes inline in a paragraph and have them converted before processing with MultiMarkdown. It’s not such a chore to skip a few lines and drop in the footnote syntax that this should be part of the spec, but it is something I would find handy in several situations. So…

The format I picked uses a syntax like this to denote a footnote:

This is the regular text(*This is the footnote*), and you can drop the footnote in at any point.

The Service can handle footnotes inside of lines, at the end of lines, spanning multiple lines with breaks (creates paragraphs) and does fine with Markdown within the footnote. One nice thing about this syntax is that–if you’re previewing as you write–it italicizes the output to differentiate it until you’ve used the service to move it out of the main text.

Multi-line footnotes need to begin at the end of a line of text, and just use double-newlines to separate paragraphs within the footnote, e.g.:

...the end of the paragraph. (*This is a footnote

which is going to span

more than one line*)

Here’s the script, also available as a Service download at the end of the post.

Update: I just added a fix (in code below and the Service download) for making sure that footnote reference titles aren’t duplicated if you have existing MultiMarkdown-formatted footnotes in the document.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
 
def e_sh(str)
	str.to_s.gsub(/(?=[^a-zA-Z0-9_.\/\-\x7F-\xFF\n])/n, '\\')
end
 
input = STDIN.read
 
footnotes = input.scan(/\(\*(.*?)\*\)/m)
existing = input.scan(/^\[\^fn(\d+)\]: /i)
counter = existing.empty? ? 1 : existing.uniq.sort[-1].join.to_i + 1
 
output = []
footnotes.each {|note| 
	output << {'orig' => note[0], 'title' => "fn#{counter}", 'footnote' => note[0] }
	counter += 1
}
 
o = []
output.each_with_index { |x,i| 
	o.push("[^#{x['title']}]: #{x['footnote'].gsub(/\n\n(\s*.)/,"\n\n\t\\1")}")
	input.gsub!(/\(\*#{e_sh x['orig']}\*\)/m,"[^#{x['title']}]")
}
puts input.strip + "\n\n#{o.join("\n\n")}\n"

I’m in San Francisco for an AOL Tech code jam right now, so I don’t have a lot of time to thoroughly test this. Please let me know about any bugs that need fixing.

If you’re in San Francisco and like coffee or beer, hit me up on Twitter. If you’re here for Macworld, then you’d better be at my “40 Tips in 40 Minutes” talk with David Sparks and Merlin Mann on Thursday!

Related posts:

1. A better System Service for Evernote clipping — with MultiMarkdown
2. Auto-convert your inline Markdown links to references
3. A System Service for to. url shortening

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at A Service for writing MultiMarkdown footnotes inline

Dayone uses a very simple XML format in separate files to store your entries. It’s easy to replicate the structure using a script, allowing you to directly generating your own Day One entries from any part of your workflow. I’m bypassing the dayone CLI and dropping the updates in directly for added flexibility. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love that Day One comes with a CLI, I just wanted to experiment around it.

I’m using the new iCloud support for sync, and this Service is built to work with that folder structure by default. The version below (and in the download) looks in “~/Library/Mobile Documents/” (where iCloud stores documents) for a folder containing the word “dayoneapp.” I don’t know offhand what the bizarre names of the folders indicate, but they differ between accounts, so we have to grep out the matching folder. Assuming your Journal is called Journal_dayone (default) and you’re using iCloud, you shouldn’t have to edit anything. If it doesn’t work, run this in Terminal and copy the resulting path into the “dayonepath” variable:

find ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/ -name "Journal_dayone"

If you’re using Dropbox, you’ll just need to make a minor alteration to the “dayonepath” variable. Delete the line starting with “dayonedir” and hardcode the Unix (POSIX) path to the “entries” folder, located directly inside of the Journal.dayone bundle in your Dropbox root folder. It will most likely be /Users/[yourusername]/Dropbox/Journal.dayone/entries/ if you haven’t changed any defaults in Dropbox or Day One.

The service itself is available for download at the end of the post, or you can take the script below and home-roll your own in Automator. It should work out of the box, no need for ruby gems or symlinked CLIs.

The only configuration you may want to edit is the “starred” variable. This defaults to off because Services aren’t interactive and you probably don’t want to star every entry you clip. If you do, though, just change “starred = false” to “starred = true” and it will make your calendar look like a planetarium.

The Service will use /usr/bin/textutil to strip out any rich text artifacts. I’m not certain this is necessary, but I found that when clipping rich text I would lose all of my line breaks and indents. This seems to solve it. The script also looks for text with hard breaks and handles them Github-style, preserving breaks using Markdown line break syntax.

If you have Growl running, you’ll get a notification. To be polite, it checks for Growl before attempting any notifications. The check can be slow sometimes, though, so you may want to either remove the check if you always have Growl running, or remove the whole Growl section at the end if you don’t.

The script:

Here’s the script. The same script can be found in the Service download at the end by opening the .workflow file in Automator. You can easily customize/edit from there, so this is posted just for reference.

require 'time'
require 'erb'
 
def e_sh(str)
	str.to_s.gsub(/(?=[^a-zA-Z0-9_.\/\-\x7F-\xFF\n])/n, '\\').gsub(/\n/, "'\n'").sub(/^$/, "''")
end
 
input = STDIN.read
entrytext = %x{echo #{e_sh input}|textutil -stdin -convert txt -stdout}
entrytext.gsub!(/\n([^\n])/,"    \n\\1")
uuid = %x{uuidgen}.gsub(/-/,'').strip
datestamp = Time.now.utc.iso8601
starred = false
 
dayonedir = %x{ls ~/Library/Mobile\\ Documents/|grep dayoneapp}.strip
dayonepath = "~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/#{dayonedir}/Documents/Journal_dayone/entries/"
 
template = ERB.new <<-XMLTEMPLATE
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Creation Date</key>
	<date><%= datestamp %></date>
	<key>Entry Text</key>
	<string><![CDATA[<%= entrytext %>]]></string>
	<key>Starred</key>
	<<%= starred %>/>
	<key>UUID</key>
	<string><%= uuid %></string>
</dict>
</plist>
XMLTEMPLATE
 
fh = File.new(File.expand_path(dayonepath+uuid+".doentry"),'w+')
fh.puts template.result(binding)
fh.close
 
growl_running = %x{osascript -e 'tell application "system events" to return (count of (every process whose bundle identifier is "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp")) > 0'}
 
if growl_running
  %x{osascript -e 'tell application id "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp" to register as application "Clip to Day One" all notifications {"Clip Complete"} default notifications {"Clip Complete"} icon of application "Day One"'}
  %x{osascript -e 'tell application id "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp" to notify with name "Clip Complete" title "Log to Day One" description "Clipped to Day One" application name "Clip to Day One"'}
end

Side note: I mentioned to @brianstucki that this Service might contain the necessary ingredients for an Evernote-to-Day-One solution, but I’ve realized it’s really only the last part of the equation. What you’d probably want to do with most RTF/text notes is export HTML, extract the “created on” meta and parse it into the correct date format, then pipe the rest of the contents through markdownify_cli.php, passing the result to dayone new. Then you’ll have nice, Markdown versions of your notes from Evernote, preserving much of the formatting. I tested this, and it works pretty flawlessly for text notes.

Download

For complete instructions on installing the service (and adding a keyboard shortcut for it), see the how-to posted here.

Related posts:

1. Quick Tip: Quickly clear stuck Growl notifications
2. A System Service for to. url shortening
3. Updated: Songza Lucky Link Service

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at System Service: Clip to Day One

I’ve posted two more updates to the Markdown Service Tools. The first change is a fix for UTF-8 characters in the HTML to Clipboard Service I introduced yesterday. I had no idea that pbcopy didn’t like UTF-8 by default. I found a solution at Mac OS X Hints which seems to be working. I updated the Service in the main download, let me know if it still has trouble with any UTF-8/16 characters.

Secondly, I added a Service that allows you to select an entire document’s text and convert any inline links to reference-style links, with the references sorted and neatly placed at the end of the document. It’s pretty smart about maintaining existing reference links, creating titles, recognizing multiple instances of links, etc., but I can’t account for everyone’s writing style. If you have a reasonable suggestion for improvements (or find any bugs, which is likely), do drop me a line and let me know.

Visit the Markdown Service Tools project page for full info and download.

Related posts:

1. A Service for writing MultiMarkdown footnotes inline
2. Some Chrome love for the Markdown Service Tools
3. Auto-link text service updated

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Auto-convert your inline Markdown links to references

I wrote the basic script in Ruby to run as a TextMate command:

input = STDIN.read
 
# Quick function to add commas to long values
def add_commas( number )
  number.to_s.reverse.scan(/(?:\d*\.)?\d{1,3}-?/).join(',').reverse
end
 
# Scan for numbers in the text
arr = input.scan(/\.?\d[\d,]+(?:\.\d+)?/).map{|line|
  # remove non-decimal characters from results and convert to float
  line.gsub(/[^\d\.]/,'').to_f
}.sort
 
print input # output the original text
 
# if there were 2 or more numbers found, output the additional information
print "\n - Average of #{arr.size} numbers ranging from #{arr[0]} to #{arr[arr.size-1]}: " + add_commas(arr.inject(0.0) { |sum,el| sum + el } / arr.size ) unless arr.empty? || arr.size == 1

The script is simple enough that it should be easily adjustable to perform any kind of basic math on the array of numbers found in the text. The numbers don’t have to be in any order in the input; they can be listed vertically or horizontally or can just be scattered throughout text or messy table code. The regular expression should find them.

The TextMate command suited my needs just fine, but then I started thinking about sharing it. What format would make the most sense? A System Service that accepted text and appended a line with the average? A TextExpander snippet that ran on the clipboard? A LaunchBar action that worked with Instant Send or Copy/Paste? I couldn’t decide, and since the script was the only time-consuming part, I went ahead and made all of the above.

The TextExpander snippet is now in the Tools group of my TextExpander projects. If you’re subscribed to that group via URL, your group already updated with the “Average numbers in clipboard” snippet. Otherwise, go ahead and download it or set up a new subscription.

The other two versions (and the script) are in the download below, and I threw in the original TextMate command, too. The LaunchBar action is actually a Script Bundle with the Ruby script packaged inside. If you’ve ever wondered how to reference a self-contained script in AppleScript, it’s a decent example. It installs to ~/Library/Application Support/LaunchBar/Actions. The System Service is a standard Automator action using the script above, and installs to ~/Library/Services.

Want to see a video of it? Really? Why? I’m in that semi-asleep state where I thought it would be easier to show what it does than explain it. Since I doubt anyone else really has a need for this script, the video is a tribute to my ability to waste time in the early morning.

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Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at An average morning

I know there have been a lot of posts here today (at least compared to my average)… I’m on “vacation,” technically. I’m actually packing up boxes for a move to a new house over the next couple of days, and this is my OSHA break. I make no promises about keeping this rate of posting up!

Anyway, you can download the latest version of the Markdown Service Tools below, or see the project page for more information on all of the included services.

Related posts:

1. New Markdown Service tool: HTML to Clipboard
2. Auto-convert your inline Markdown links to references
3. Auto-link text service updated

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Some Chrome love for the Markdown Service Tools

I left it as the Perl version instead of the new PEG version because it was easier to embed, and allows me to force “snippet” rendering. Modify as you see fit, but this version makes a nice, neat package that does MultiMarkdown rendering without the need for any other installation. I thought others might find it useful, especially as an addition to Marked and nvALT capabilities, so here it is!

Download the service as part of the Markdown Service Tools package. See the how-to page on Installing System Services if you have questions!

Related posts:

1. Some Chrome love for the Markdown Service Tools
2. Quick Tip: clean up your MultiMarkdown tables
3. Auto-convert your inline Markdown links to references

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at New Markdown Service tool: HTML to Clipboard

A few people have requested a TextExpander set for dates. The problem is, getting the current date is easy with TextExpander variables, so that one’s not worth the time to me. Anything else requires some scripting, and to be really flexible the set would need to include a very large array of snippets; more than I could possibly keep straight. It could be done with one snippet if you could use the Fill In dialog as an input to a shell script, but you can’t (are you listening Smile?).

Instead, I whipped up a System Service this morning that lets you use keywords and natural language date input to return the specified date in various formats. You type out something like date next tuesday, select the text and run the Service and it will give you back 8/23/11. If there’s no matching keyword at the beginning, it will assume %c (strftime formatting) and give you back Tue Aug 23 12:00:00 2011.

The keywords are:

date = ‘%m/%d/%y’ (slashed date)

“date today” gives you “8/20/11″

local = ‘%F’ (localized date)

“local today” gives you (well, me) “2011–8-20″

short = ‘%a, %b %d, %Y’ (abbreviated full date)

“short today” gives you “Sat, Aug 20, 2011″

long = ‘%A, %B %d, %Y’ (long full date)

“long today” gives you “Saturday, August 20, 2011″

The language you can use depends on whether or not you have the “chronic” rubygem installed. If you can install rubygems, go to Terminal and run sudo gem install chronic. If that fails, no worries, it will use PHP’s strtotime to parse your string. It has a slightly more limited vocabulary, but anything like “wednesday,” “yesterday” or “next friday” will work.

It installs like any other service, and you can set a keyboard shortcut for it in System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Services. Refer to my how-to on Installing System Services for a step-by-step explanation. This service was written on Lion, but should work fine on Snow Leopard, too.

Feel free to extend the script with more keywords and formats. It’s not too technical, just open up the workflow in Automator and find the case block for the keywords (around line 52). Then, copy the when 'long' then '%A, %B %d, %Y' format and paste new lines (or edit existing ones) before the end statement, keyword first then format (again, see PHP’s documentation for strftime). Both Chronic and strtotime accept times as well, so if you wanted to do something like date friday 3pm, you could add the format string for a time specification to an existing or new keyword.

Update: If you’re looking for something similar in Python, Macdrifter has posted an alternative version which works with Keyboard Maestro. Check it out.

Related posts:

1. Natural language dates for TextExpander
2. Natural language date conversion for TextMate
3. Updated: Songza Lucky Link Service

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at OS X Service for natural language dates

You can select an entire stylesheet and it will send back the text with the necessary changes, or just run it on a single rule to have it vendor-prefixed for you. It turns this:

p {
  transition: all .2s ease-in-out;
  box-shadow: 1px 1px 4px rgba(0,0,0,.3) ;
  color: #333;
}

into:

p {
	-webkit-transition: all .2s ease-in-out;
	-moz-transition: all .2s ease-in-out;
	-o-transition: all .2s ease-in-out;
	-ms-transition: all .2s ease-in-out;
	transition: all .2s ease-in-out;
 
	-webkit-box-shadow: 1px 1px 4px rgba(0,0,0,.3);
	-moz-box-shadow: 1px 1px 4px rgba(0,0,0,.3);
	box-shadow: 1px 1px 4px rgba(0,0,0,.3);
 
	color: #333;
}

Pretty handy. Sass can do this for you, and there are already plugins for TextMate, Vim, Espresso, Coda and more on Prefixr’s API page. Just thought I’d add one more to the pile.

Unzip it and drop it into ~/Library/Services. Select some text containing CSS3 properties and right click on the selection, then look under “Services” for the Prefixer service. Run it and (assuming you have an internet connection), it’ll do some of the tedious parts of CSS3 for you.

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Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Prefixr OS X Service

The table syntax in MultiMarkdown is intuitive and can be really fast to work with. Much faster than coding HTML tables, to be sure. Unless you’re pretty religious about your spacing, though, the plain text version can get out of hand pretty quickly. If only there were some way to make them pretty in one click…

You’ve already got the tools, I would imagine, but you might not have known they were there. I didn’t notice until tonight, but I don’t work with tables much in MultiMarkdown. In the “Utilities” folder of the MultiMarkdown installation there’s a Perl script that will do amazing things to messy MultiMarkdown tables. The more I play with it, the more I think that Fletcher Penney is a genius.

My advice? Make it into a System Service and use it everywhere. Just open up the file at ~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown/Utilities/table_cleanup.pl in your favorite text editor. Open Automator and create a new Service, dragging the Run Shell Script action into the right panel. Set it to Perl, accept text, replace text and copy the contents of the script into the action. Save it and run it on some table text! If you’re running any of the Markdown Service Tools, you can name it “md — Clean Up Tables” and it will fit right in with your Services menu.

Play around with it, it’s pretty amazing. You can control certain aspects of the results by messing with the header rows, and it even centers text in centered columns (:----:). Thank you, Fletcher Penney.

Related posts:

1. A few themes for MultiMarkdown Composer
2. Taking the Markdown to Evernote service further
3. New Markdown Service tool: HTML to Clipboard

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Quick Tip: clean up your MultiMarkdown tables

I actually already own an app which can do this to some extent, and I know there are more available. I like to do things the hard way once in a while. What I wanted was a basic script which could execute arbitrary code whenever a file of a certain type changed within a directory. The use case is web development: whenever I change a site-related file (html, php, css, less, rb, erb, etc.), I want Safari to refresh the related page.

Folder Actions don’t work well on my system (do they work for anyone?). Hazel would work, but I needed something more immediate. I had a version that used launchd, but it was difficult to consistently start and stop from a script. Here’s the final solution I came up with.

At the top, let me say that the heavy lifting in my script was taken from a SASS file-watching script by Carlo Zottman. It uses Ruby to poll a file collection for modification date variations, and keeps a pretty low profile. I wanted to avoid compiled code for this, as I eventually do want to go to bed tonight.

The basic goals:

• Watch only files of a specific type
• Refresh my primary browser when a change occurs
• Refresh across windows and tabs, but limit by user-specified keyword in URL

I built both a command line script and a System Service to do this, and both work as standalone solutions. The Automator action makes it possible to right click a folder in Finder and choose “Watcher” to start watching it, and it asks you for the tab keyword in a nice popup dialog. Beyond that, it really just wraps the command line script. You can modify either with the following instructions.

Here’s the command line version:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# watch.rb by Brett Terpstra, 2011 <http://brettterpstra.com>
# with credit to Carlo Zottmann <https://github.com/carlo/haml-sass-file-watcher>
 
trap("SIGINT") { exit }
 
if ARGV.length < 2
  puts "Usage: #{$0} watch_folder keyword"
  puts "Example: #{$0} . mywebproject"
  exit
end
 
dev_extension = 'dev'
filetypes = ['css','html','htm','php','rb','erb','less','js']
watch_folder = ARGV[0]
keyword = ARGV[1]
puts "Watching #{watch_folder} and subfolders for changes in project files..."
 
while true do
  files = []
  filetypes.each {|type|
    files += Dir.glob( File.join( watch_folder, "**", "*.#{type}" ) )
  }
  new_hash = files.collect {|f| [ f, File.stat(f).mtime.to_i ] }
  hash ||= new_hash
  diff_hash = new_hash - hash
 
  unless diff_hash.empty?
    hash = new_hash
 
    diff_hash.each do |df|
      puts "Detected change in #{df[0]}, refreshing"
      %x{osascript<<ENDGAME
        	tell application "Safari"
          	set windowList to every window
          	repeat with aWindow in windowList
          		set tabList to every tab of aWindow
          		repeat with atab in tabList
          			if (URL of atab contains "#{keyword}") then
          			  tell atab to do javascript "window.location.reload()"
          			end if
          		end repeat
          	end repeat
        	end tell
ENDGAME
}
    end
  end
 
  sleep 1
end

Installing

If you want to use the above script from Terminal, just put it in a directory in your path and run chmod a+x watch.rb on it. Then you can call it with watch.rb folder/to/watch keyword. The keyword you pass will determine which tabs will refresh in your browser. For example, if I’m working on dev.heckyesmarkdown.com (my local development version), I would use “dev.heckyes” to limit the refresh to only associated tabs. Once the script is running, you can stop it any time by typing Control-C in that Terminal. If you’ve run it in the background, you’ll either need to foreground it or kill it manually.

To install the System Service, download the workflow, unzip it and place it in ~/Library/Services (where ‘~’ is your home folder). It will now show up when you right click on one or more selected folders in the Finder. Choose “Watcher,” enter a URL-matching keyword and let it go. You should see the spinning gear icon in your menubar. When you want to stop watching the folder, click that icon and choose “Stop Watcher”.

Customizing

In the standalone Ruby script (above), you can easily modify the watched filetypes in line 14, and you can replace the AppleScript with your own starting on line 34. I’ll offer some examples for other browsers below.

The Service contains pretty much the same script, but modified to work with an Automator workflow. If you open it in Automator and skip to the last action, you’ll see the script and you can make your filetype and AppleScript modifications in there.

Using other browsers

Chrome has decent AppleScript support these days, so changing this script to work with it is trivial. Just replace the AppleScript portion (beginning with “tell application…”) with the following:

tell application "Google Chrome"
	set windowList to every window
	repeat with aWindow in windowList
		set tabList to every tab of aWindow
		repeat with atab in tabList
			if (URL of atab contains "#{keyword}") then
				tell atab to reload
			end if
		end repeat
	end repeat
end tell

Firefox is a little less elegant, as far as I know, and requires System Events scripting to refresh a page. If you know a better way, I’d love to hear it, but here’s a basic script for reloading the front page. You might as well delete the keyword portions of the script/workflow if you go this route, they won’t be applicable:

 tell app "Firefox" to activate
 tell app "System Events"
   keystroke "r" using command down
 end tell

I won’t detail any other browsers; if you’re doing web development in something more exotic, I’ll assume you know how to script it.

Executing arbitrary code

You don’t have to refresh browsers with this. You don’t even have to use it for web development. Have it watch text files for changes and run an iCal script when one is modified. It’s basically a hyperactive Folder Action.

If you want to have the script do something new every time you use it, you might want to externalize the action code. Just modify the diff_hash.each do |df| block to run an outside script. If it’s shell code, just make it executable and call it with %x{path/to/script}, and if it’s AppleScript, call it with %x{/usr/bin/osascript path/to/script}. Then you can modify the action script each time without changing the watch.rb file.

If you want to get really crazy, you could pass the script to execute as a command line parameter, or request it in the Automator workflow and pass it in. I don’t have a need for that right now, but if you build it, let me know!

I hope folks find this useful. Now, excuse me while I go retch for a little bit.

Download

Related posts:

1. OS X Service for natural language dates
2. A few scripts for TaskPaper users
3. A Bash function for Markdown bloggers

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Watch for file changes and refresh your browser automatically

I’ve had this one laying around for a long time, so I thought I’d toss it out on the ‘net and see if anyone else had a use for it. It’s actually really handy, and a big timesaver. It takes selected text and uses the Yahoo API to run a quick search for that term, and returns the result as a Markdown link. You can, of course, modify the output to any text-based markup (Rich Text links are a pain).

There’s a quick video of it in action in the full post, plus some extra info and a download link…

The Service is called “First Yahoo Link,” and does exactly that. In the video below, I just wrote out some random words that were pretty sure to have predictable search results. The more vague the search terms, the more unpredictable the result, obviously. I’m running the Service with the shortcut CTRL-SHIFT-Y, which I set in the Keyboard pane of the System Preferences. Here goes:

The majority of the code is a Yahoo API wrapper for Ruby by Premshree Pillai. I just shoved it into my Run Shell Script action in the Automator Workflow and built off of it. It just escapes your selected text, passes it to a Web search and then formats the first result in the returned array. There’s probably a lot more you could do with it, but I like its simplicity and relative speed. It’s definitely faster than flipping over to a browser, running a search and copying a link, coming back and pasting/formatting it manually.

Give it a shot, you never know, you just might like it.

Oh, and in case you haven’t been through this drill before, unzip the file, put the resulting workflow file in ~/Library/Services and then go into System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts and add a shortcut key for the “First Yahoo Link” service you should now have in there. Then just select text and hit your shortcut key (or pull it down in the Application > Services menu). Done.

Related posts:

1. Auto-link text service updated
2. Songza Lucky Link Service
3. Updated: Songza Lucky Link Service

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Automated search and link text Service

It’s a very simple little shell command which uses curl to track down the destination of a shortened url (or any link with a redirect). It works with an assortment of services, including bit.ly, tinyurl.com, ow.ly, etc. It returns the destination address (the original url), and you can pass that on to whatever you like!

Side note: I’ve been working on a little site called JustTheLinks which makes liberal use of url-lengthening. It grabs all of your tweets from your home timeline which contain links, and creates a live-updated list with expanded urls and titles. It uses PHP’s curl to do the trick, so it’s the same concept. It’s “in-progress,” but feel free to check it out at http://justthelinks.com!

Anyway, I decided to update the Quicksilver action and adapt it for some other uses. I’m happy to report that it’s still quite useful as a command line script, a LaunchBar action or a System Service. This post has code for all three, so take your pick!

The curl command in this script has two options specified, –I and –s. –I tells it to fetch only the headers of the requested URI, and the –s tells it to suppress error messages (silent). The result is a short response which contains the location of the redirect, which is piped to awk. We look for the line in the response containing “Location” and print the second field of that line, which is the destination url. Here are a few ways I thought of to put it to use:

Terminal

The first thing I did was whip up a shell script to run from the command line. Just create a text file wherever you keep scripts², or make a new directory somewhere for it. Paste in the code below, and name it something that makes sense to you. I went with follow, because it’s following the redirect path, and expand was taken (and lengthen didn’t seem as much fun to type…). The script looks for a single argument, which would be the shortened url, and if it doesn’t receive one it tries the clipboard. So, if you already have the url in your clipboard, which is a pretty safe bet in this case, you can just run the script with no arguments.

#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
  curl -Is `pbpaste` | awk '/Location/ { print $2 }'  
else
  curl -Is $1 | awk '/Location/ { print $2 }'
fi

LaunchBar

I heart LaunchBar. Like Quicksilver, you can easily build “actions” for it that act on different types of input. This one just acts on text you paste or send to it, and assumes it’s going to be a shortened URL. After it lengthens it, it just displays the result as large popup text. If you wanted to, you could easily have it open location or whatever, but the whole point is just to see where you’re going, right?

This just goes into ~/Library/Application Support/LaunchBar/Actions as a compiled AppleScript (scpt) file. Open AppleScript Editor and paste in the code below (or just click here to open it automatically in your editor). Save the file to the Actions folder and give it a name you’ll recognize. Mine’s called ‘Expand Shortened URL.scpt’. Clever, I know. Here’s the code:

on handle_string(message)

    tell application "LaunchBar"
        set _res to do shell script "curl -Is " & message & " | awk '/Location/ { print $2 }'"
        display in large type _res
    end tell

end handle_string

Snow Leopard Service

Lastly, here’s a System Service that you can run on selected text in any Cocoa application. I’ve previously posted a Service for shortening urls, so here’s the opposite. This one can actually take a whole block of text and will scan for any and all links in it, attempting to lengthen and replace any shortened urls in the text. Here’s how to build it:

• Open Automator.app
• Select “Service” from the new file menu
• Set “Service receives selected” to “text” in “any application”
• Check the “Replaces selected text” box
• Find the “Run Shell Script” action on the left and drag it into your workflow on the right
• Set the Shell to Ruby (in this case)
• Paste in the code below
• Save the file to the ~/Library/Services folder, named something like “Expand shortened urls in selection” (or something more interesting)

Now, when you select text in any Cocoa application (Safari, Mail, TextEdit, etc.), you’ll be able to find your Service in the Services submenu of either the application menu in the menubar, or in the contextual menu that comes up when you right click (ctrl-click) the selected text. When you run it, it will replace your text with a new version with any shortened urls in it expanded.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -rjcode -Ku

require 'open-uri'

input = STDIN.read
links = input.scan(/\b((?:https?:\/\/)(?:www\.)?([^\/]+)\/[a-zA-Z0-9]+[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’])/im)
links.each {|link|
  result = %x{curl -Is #{link[0]} | awk '/Location/ { print $2 }'}
  input = input.gsub(/#{link[0]}/,result.strip)
}
print input

How often will you need any of these little experiments? Probably not very often. Most of the time, I’m more than happy to just follow a shortened link and trust that the description it came with will hold true. Every once in a while, though, I come across a link of unknown origin that I’d prefer to run through something like this. Hopefully you’ll be able to find a use for it, too. It’s a cool little snippet.

Related posts:

1. A System Service for to. url shortening
2. LaunchBar actions for url encoding and decoding
3. A better System Service for Evernote clipping — with MultiMarkdown

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Is your URL too short? Try our system, free!

When I decided to fix this, the first issue was that when EverSave creates the Evernote note, it lets Evernote convert the list from HTML to Rich Text. Once it’s stored in Rich Text Format (RTF), manipulating it via any shell language, including AppleScript, becomes quite difficult. It’s not impossible, but I quickly decided it wasn’t a route I wanted to wander down. Here’s what I did do…

Saving tabs to Evernote

What I ended up doing was modifying what EverSave stored, and including the actual URL in the visible text of the note. It’s not the prettiest solution, but it’s the only way that this particular system will work. I did my best to minimize the visual presence of the URL using the rudimentary markup that Evernote actually pays attention to. The final product looks like this:

The actual layout is still fully controlled by the _template property in the first line, which is the only line that’s changed from the original script. I’m posting the whole thing again, with this minor revision, for convenience. With a little bit of HTML (remember to escape your double quotes), you can modify the template to look however you like. Just keep in mind that Evernote strips 90% of markup out when it creates the note from your HTML, so stick with basic tags. See the original EverSave post for a breakdown of the script.

Be sure to continue reading after the script to see how we handle the “restore” functionality.

property _template : "<li><strong><a href="%url">&uArr;</a> %name</strong> < <small>%url</small> >"
 
--search and replace function for template
on snr(tofind, toreplace, TheString)
	set ditd to text item delimiters
	set text item delimiters to tofind
	set textItems to text items of TheString
	set text item delimiters to toreplace
	if (class of TheString is string) then
		set res to textItems as string
	else -- if (class of TheString is Unicode text) then
		set res to textItems as Unicode text
	end if
	set text item delimiters to ditd
	return res
end snr
 
set prettyDate to do shell script "date '+%A, %B %d, %Y at %l:%M %p'"
set theTitle to "Bookmarks " & prettyDate
set urlList to "<ul>"
 
tell application "Safari"
	set tabList to every tab of front window
	repeat with aTab in tabList
		set aLink to _template
		set aLink to my snr("%name", name of aTab, aLink)
		set aLink to my snr("%url", URL of aTab, aLink)
		set urlList to urlList & aLink & return
	end repeat
end tell
set urlList to urlList & "</ul>"
 
tell application "Evernote"
	set theNote to create note with html urlList title theTitle notebook "Bookmarks"
end tell

I have this script saved as “EverSave.scpt” in my ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Safari folder (create it if you don’t have it), and launch it using FastScripts with a Command-Shift-S shortcut. Safari doesn’t have anything bound to that key-combo, and it’s easy to remember (Save As in most programs).

Restoring tabs

This solution makes a few assumptions, but the script is easily customized to handle any differences in your setup. I went with a System Service (Snow Leopard) for the restore function, primarily because it allows me to act directly on selected text in Evernote. It’s a very simple Ruby script that parses the selected text for urls, and then opens any that it finds in sequential order using your default browser. There’s a commented out line if you want to always target Safari directly when opening them, which may be useful in some situations. I use Choosy, and have a rule that just directs all of these to Safari. If you have Safari set as your default browser, and that’s where you want to open your links, this will just work as is.

To set up the service:

1. Open Automator and select “Service” as the new file type.
2. On the right hand side, tell it that “Service receives selected” text in Evernote.app (choose Other… and select Evernote).
3. Find “Run Shell Script” in the list on the left and drag it into the area on the right.
4. Set the Shell dropdown to /usr/bin/ruby
5. Insert the following code, and feel free to modify
6. Save the result as “EverRestore”
7. Assign a shortcut key, if desired, in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services

Here’s the code for the service:

ARGF.each do |f|
    links = f.scan /< (https?://.*?) >/mi
    # The above scans specifically for the angle brackets in my template. 
    # If you remove those from the output of EverSave, be sure to update
    # the regular expression accordingly.
    if links.empty? then
        exit
    else
        links.each {|link| %x{osascript -e &#x27;open location "#{link[0]}"&#x27;}}
        # links.each {|link| %x{osascript -e &#x27;tell application "Safari" to open location "#{link[0]}"&#x27;} }
    end
end

The simple regular expression in line 2 does scan specifically for the angle brackets I used in the new EverSave template. That just relieves some complexity. If you want a regular expression that doesn’t require the angle brackets, try replacing line 2 with this:

links = f.scan /(https?://([^s",;]+)..{2,4}(/[^s",;!]+))/mi

Once it’s saved in Automator, it should be available when you select text in Evernote. If there are visible URLs in the selected text, running this Service will open them in tabs in Safari (or your default browser). You can selectively open certain urls by only selecting the lines that contain the ones you want to open. Non-contiguous selections will require a little text editing, of course.

Not as hard as it looks… really.

The explanation got a little long, and probably seems unnecessarily complex. The fact is, I can save a Safari browsing session with one key combo, edit, annotate and tag it (if I want to), then restore it later by highlighting and typing a new command combination. It’s actually quite convenient, and fairly bulletproof. I’d love to hear how you use it, or what you’re doing instead!

Related posts:

1. Antique Safari Reader hack update with Evernote goodness
2. Clippable to Evernote Snow Leopard Service
3. Save Safari tabs to Instapaper

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at EverSave revisited, now with session restore!

• Open Automator and choose “Service” from the first menu.
• Tell it that the service “receives text” in “any application”.
• Drag the “Run Shell Script” action from the left side.
• Set the Shell to Ruby
• Paste in the code below (or something of your own, hopefully far more interesting)
• Save it with an intuitive name
• Use it.

require 'net/http'
require 'cgi'
 
input = STDIN.read
http = Net::HTTP.new('to.')
path = '/'
 
data = "url=#{CGI.escape(input.strip)}"
headers = {'Content-Type' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'}
 
resp, data = http.post(path, data, headers)
 
if resp.code.to_i == 200
  print data.split(/value="/)[1].split(/"/)[0]
else
  print input
end

Basically, anything you can do to or with text or files using a major scripting language, you can make into a Snow Leopard service. Now that I’ve set the bar this low, I’d love to see what new Services everyone else is cooking up!

Update: Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. It works sometimes, but leaves url parameters in the shortened url half the time. I haven’t figured out why, but I’ll leave it up and see if someone can point out the error of my ways…Fixed it, just neglected to notice it needed a POST, not a GET

Update 2: Here, this one’s shorter and more useful :)

require 'open-uri'
require 'cgi'
 
input = STDIN.read
print open("http://is.gd/api.php?longurl=#{CGI.escape(input.strip)}").read

Related posts:

1. Is your URL too short? Try our system, free!
2. TextExpander: bit.ly with authentication
3. TextExpander experiments

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at A System Service for to. url shortening

To install, just download the file below, unzip it (double click), and move it into [your username]/Library/Services. To use it, select text in any Cocoa app (Safari, Mail, and most Mac apps) and look under the application menu in the menubar for the Services submenu. Trigger it from there, or just right click on your selected text and you should get the same services menu as a contextual menu item. If you’re feeling clever, go into the Keyboard preferences pane, choose Keyboard Shortcuts -> Services and double click the blank space to the right of the service to assign a hotkey. As long as that hotkey isn’t already assigned by the application your using, you can trigger the service with it any time you have text selected.

Related posts:

1. Songza Lucky Link Service
2. Songza is back!
3. Auto-link text service updated

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Updated: Songza Lucky Link Service