Winners will be drawn at noon on Wednesday, November 30th and notified by email. Please use a valid email address and a unique name (to make announcing the winners easier). One entry per person per giveaway, but feel free to enter for every giveaway I’m running this week! I have a lot of amazing applications to share right now… keep checking back, there are at least three more coming before this madness ends!

Smile, the company behind TextExpander, is also running their own special for Black Friday. Today only, get PDFPen or PDFPenPro for 50% off. It’s the perfect time to jump on one of the most powerful tools available for creating fillable forms and working with PDF files.

Related posts:

1. Mac App Giveaway: Byword
2. Mac App Giveaway: PDFpen
3. Mac App Giveaway: MultiMarkdown Composer

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Mac App Giveaway: TextExpander

I find my OS X Service for natural language date conversion pretty handy. I think TextExpander could make it handier, though, with the form fill feature and a little more flexibility.

I’ve added the new snippet to the Tools group in the TextExpander Project, so TextExpander users can grab the download or self-updating URL and play with it.

Of note

It accepts most basic date language. “today”, “tomorrow”, “3 days”, “2 days ago”, “next tue”, “last fri”, etc.

I added a couple of checks. If you use a plus (+) or minus (-) sign followed immediately by a number and that’s all, it will just add or subtract that many days from the current date. The plus sign is optional, it will work with just “3” to give you the date 3 days from now.

If the words “am”, “pm”, “noon”, “midnight”, “hours” or “minutes” are in your string, it will add the time string to the formatted output.

Setup

This one runs on PHP, so it’s ready to use with your built-in tools and has no additional dependencies. There are a few things you can edit (and probably should) once you have it open in TextExpander.

First, set the timezone correctly for your location in the third line. The next line has the primary date format, which defaults to “l, M jS, Y”, like this: Saturday, Oct 15th, 2011. The line after that is the string that’s appended if you use a phrase that triggers a time for the output, defaulting to ” \a\t g:ia” which comes out as “at 3:00pm”.

The $debug parameter can be set to 0, 1 or 2. At zero, if your string fails to translate it will fail silently. At 1, it will return the phrase “Derp” where you meant to paste the date. I figure some feedback is better than none… at 3 it will give you the “Derp” and a Growl notification if you have growlnotify installed.

The code

You can just install this from the project page, but here’s the code if your curious. This looks a little different than what you see in the snippet, I’ll show you why in a second.

#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php
date_default_timezone_set("America/Chicago");
$dateformat = "l, M jS, Y";
$timeformat = " \a\\t g:ia";
$debug = 2;
 
$input="%fill:Date string%";
 
if ( preg_match( "/^([+-])?(\d+)$/", trim($input), $matches ) ) 
{
  $input = $matches[2] . " days";
  if ($matches[1] == "-") $input .= " ago";
} 
else if ( preg_match("/([ap]m|noon|midnight|hours|minutes)/i",trim($input),$matches) ) 
{
  $dateformat .= $timeformat;
}
 
if (($timestamp = strtotime("$input")) === false) 
{
  if($debug > 1) 
    `/usr/local/bin/growlnotify -a TextExpander -t "Natural language FAIL" -m "I can't understand you when you mumble"`;
  if ($debug > 0) 
	die('Derp');
} 
else 
{
  echo date($dateformat,$timestamp);
}

Because we’re using the newly-shell-script-friendly Fill feature, normally the entire script would show up in the fill box. That’s ugly. If we add some spacing before and after the Fill placeholder, we can clear most of the excess out. Like so:

[...]
$input=










                "%fill:Date string%";
                // mon, tue, next fri, tomorrow 3pm...
                // 1, 3, -2 (days), 30 minutes...
                // avoid "on" and "at", keep it simple.







if ( preg_match( "/^([+-])?(\d+)$/", trim($input), $matches ) )
[...]

Looks like this now:

Hopefully this will be useful for some of you!

Related posts:

1. OS X Service for natural language dates
2. Natural language date conversion for TextMate
3. Additional Characters for TextExpander

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Natural language dates for TextExpander

Hey, TextExpander users! Wanna see something cool? I made a little tool this morning to allow any of my TextExpander groups to be installed with your own custom prefix. You can now use whatever is “standard” for your shortcuts. All of the group links on the project page now go to this tool, and you can open it directly for access to all of my groups.

The tool lets you select the group and enter your prefix, then provides you with a download link, a URL for “Add group from URL” in TextExpander, as well as a preview of all of the snippets in the group and how their shortcuts will be modified. If you follow a link from the TextExpander project page into the tool, it will select the appropriate group and add a suggested prefix automatically.

I’m more than happy to share the process and code with anyone who wants to implement it. There are folks working to bring together a TE community site, and I’d love to see this kind of tool implemented there. I built it was a certain amount of scalability in mind, and made it as easy as possible for people to create compatible files for it.

If you want to add your own groups to my tool, let me know. I’ll come up with a way of providing attribution and possibly start a full repository here, to be mirrored or moved once a dedicated outlet becomes available.

Addendum

In case you’re wondering how it works: you take a .textexpander file, run a search and replace on it to change your own standard prefix into ‘[[PREFIX]]’ and rename the file with a .tedist extension. Drop it into a folder on the web server and it will automatically show up in the list of available groups, and the snippets preview is generated on the fly by parsing the plist via an Ajax call. No database for now, just globbing and parsing. I like it.

The code is available on GitHub for anyone who wants to play. The next step is to turn it into a community site: add a means of attribution (which will either mean a database or metadata in the .tedist files) and an uploader for contributions. Then search and organization features, of course. That’s the direction Poslavsky Alexander and I want to head with http://te-snippets.com. We’ll keep you posted.

Related posts:

1. Additional Characters for TextExpander
2. Markdown snippets for TextExpander touch
3. Filesystem navigation with TextExpander

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at New: TextExpander downloads with custom prefixes

Related posts:

1. New: TextExpander downloads with custom prefixes
2. Filesystem navigation with TextExpander
3. Dynamic placeholder images, now with kittens

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Additional Characters for TextExpander

If you’re not familiar with “Go to folder,” it’s a keyboard geeks way of navigating in Finder. From a finder window or any save/open dialog, just type Command-Shift-G to get a little dialog where you can type a path directly in POSIX syntax (~/Library/etc.). You can also bring it up just by typing the tilde symbol (~). Tab completion works to a minimal extent, in that it’s case sensitive and generally guess wrong if there is more than one possible completion. Handy nonetheless.

With these snippets, and any that you add, you can just type things like ~apps to jump to your Application Support folder. I have a few that get more specific, but they’re not really general-use, so I kept them separate. The group is more of a starting point than any kind of complete library.

You can download it from the TextExpander project page or, better yet, install it using the url provided there with the “Install from URL” option in TextExpander.

I also added some new snippets to the Characters set, and made some handy changes/additions to the CSS3 set. For example, it doesn’t automatically insert a “#” in the color field anymore, so you can use RGBA without having to backspace. It also adds a field in that snippet’s fill form for “inset” shadows. If you don’t want inset, just leave it blank, but if you do, fill it in with “inset” and you won’t have to manually edit that on all three lines after you insert. There’s a new snippet for RGBA colors, and an entire set of Webkit scrollbar mods you can use. Have fun.

Related posts:

1. Additional Characters for TextExpander
2. New: TextExpander downloads with custom prefixes
3. Markdown snippets for TextExpander touch

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Filesystem navigation with TextExpander

While you might not ever show a design filled with kittens to the average client, you can keep yourself feeling warm and fuzzy while you code out the details. You were going to put the client’s images into those placeholders anyway, right?

For whatever you’d actually use it for, I threw snippets into the Tools group (started here) in my TextExpander snippets. If you’re curious, just install them from my TextExpander project page, or update your existing group if you’ve installed via the urls.

For reference, the snippet is simply this:

<img src="http://placekitten.com/g/%fill:width%/%fill:height%" alt="KITTEH %fill:width%x%fill:height%" width="%fill:width%" height="%fill:height%" />

The g/ in there makes it greyscale, just pull it out of the url to make it color instead. Both versions are in the Tools snippets.

Hey, lighten up. Try some kittens.

Related posts:

1. Additional Characters for TextExpander
2. New: TextExpander downloads with custom prefixes
3. Filesystem navigation with TextExpander

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Dynamic placeholder images, now with kittens

Early this morning, though, I decided to figure out how TextExpander was going to speed up what I do on iOS. The fact that %clipboard (insert contents of clipboard) and $| (position the cursor after inserting) still work on iOS is a big deal. I built quick snippets for auto-pairing characters and placing the cursor in the middle, and accompanying snippets for doing the same with the contents of the clipboard.

• [[ inserts “[]” and places the cursor between
• (( inserts “()” and places the cursor between
• "", <<, same thing
• c",c[,c( and c< insert pairs surrounding the contents of the clipboard
• /cl creates an inline markdown link ([](http://www.bla.com)), assumes clipboard is the link and places cursor in the square brackets after insertion

The biggest downside is the innate inability of TextExpander to act on selected text. To use the c* snippets effectively, you have to cut the text and then run the snippet. Not my favorite thing to do, but combined with the $sel macro in Nebulous Notes, they make for pretty snappy typing.

Here’s the current set of the ones that actually worked out. Let me know what you’re doing with TE in iOS and how you’re making it useful. I don’t need to know about your signoffs and abbreviations, of course, but general workflow enhancements would be awesome to hear about!

Note: You can now install these using “Add group from URL” in TextExpander with this url:

http://brettterpstra.com/share/te-snippets/iOSMarkdown.textexpander

Then you can auto-update if I expand the set in the future. I’ll be adding urls for my other TE groups soon as well.

Both the above url and the download below have been updated to fix a typo in the '' snippet.

Related posts:

1. New: TextExpander downloads with custom prefixes
2. Filesystem navigation with TextExpander
3. Additional Characters for TextExpander

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Markdown snippets for TextExpander touch

I used a Gem called Raingrams, along with Maruku for processing Markdown to HTML. See, if I had it output Markdown to begin with, I had the flexibility to do both easily. I’m posting the main script, which you can modify to output various elements and amounts of text. Even if you don’t know ruby, you can probably find your way around with a little guessing. In the section after the function definitions you can take any of the lines and output what you want by mixing or removing those elements.

This script requires Rubygems, and the Raingrams and Maruku gems. If you have Rubygems installed, you can just type sudo gem install raingrams and sudo gem install maruku at the command line to quickly get both on your system. If you don’t have Rubygems, you might want to skip this one, as you’re in for more trouble than this will pay off…

You’ll also need a text file to pull from. I’m using a chopped up version of 1984, with just enough paragraphs to get some good randomness. You can find it here, if you want it. Otherwise, choose your favorite text file and make it long enough to be random and short enough to be fast. That might take some experimentation. Put the text in a file called inputtext.txt in a directory called words in the root of your home folder. The final path should look like /Users/[YOUR USER NAME]/words/inputtext.txt.

The big script

The script should have enough comments to make it relatively easy to dissect and rebuild as a TextExpander snippet for any individual part of it.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -rjcode -Ku
 
require 'rubygems'
require 'raingrams'
require 'maruku'
 
include Raingrams
 
# All (min,max) pairs need max > min
 
@model = BigramModel.build do |model|
  model.train_with_text File.new(File.expand_path('~/words/inputtext.txt'),'r').read
end
 
@model.refresh
 
# generates a paragraph with random sentences
# min = minimum sentences
# max = maximum sentences
def graf(min,max) 
  # grab the paragraph and split it into words
  para = @model.random_paragraph({:min_sentences => min,:max_sentences => max }).split(' ')
  # add a random italics element
  em = (rand(para.count - 10) + 10)
  para[em] = "*#{para[em]}*"
  # add a random bold element
  strong = (rand(para.count - 10) + 10)
  # make sure they don't overlap
  strong = strong - 2 if strong == em
  para[strong] = "**#{para[strong]}**"
  # add a multi-word link
  link = (rand(para.count - 10) + 10)
  linkend = link + (rand(6) + 2)
  para[link] = "[#{para[link]}"
  para[linkend] = "#{para[linkend]}](http://dummy.com)"
  return para.join(' ')
end
 
# returns a random sentence, used in headlines
# min = minumum words, max = max words
def sentence(min,max) 
  return @model.random_sentence.split(' ')[0..(rand(max - min)+min)].join(' ')
end
 
# returns a random list
# type = ul or ol
# min = minimum number of list items
# max = maximum number of list items
def list(type,min,max)
  list = '';
  prefix = type == "ol" ? " 1. " : " * "
  (rand(max - min) + min).times do
    list += prefix + @model.random_gram.to_s + "\n"
  end
  list += "\n\n"
  return list
end
 
# Sequentially builds an output variable (o)
# Chop this apart to make snippets as needed
 
# Level 1 headline
o = "# " + sentence(2,5) + "\n\n"
# 2 medium paragraphs
2.times do
  o += "#{graf(4,6)}\n\n"
end
# Level 2 headline
o += "## " + sentence(4,7) + "\n\n"
# 1 short paragraph
o += graf(2,4) + "\n\n"
# an unordered list
o += list('ul',5,8) + "\n\n"
# 1 more long paragraph
o += graf(6,8) + "\n\n"
# Level 3 header
o += "### " + sentence(5,9) + "\n\n"
# medium paragraph
o += graf(4,6) + "\n\n"
# ordered list
o += list('ol',5,8) + "\n\n"
 
# Process Markdown to HTML
 
# if you want just the Markdown
# delete the two lines below
# and replace with 'puts o'
doc = Maruku.new(o)
puts doc.to_html.gsub(/\/li>\n/,'/li>').gsub(/\/li><\/([uo])l/,"/li>\n</\\1l")
# the gsub is just to clean up maruku's double-spaced list output

Here’s some sample output, generated in nvALT, using TextExpander with this script as a shell Snippet, and posted to Peggd. As you can see, it needs some fine tuning. The list items, strong and em could be multi-word, the links could check to see if there was a period-space-capital and prevent overlapping sentences, etc. It’s enough for my purposes, though, and between the script and this post, I’ve lost over an hour of what was supposed to be a productive weekend. I’m out!

Related posts:

1. The QuickCal winners
2. Random Lipsum for TextExpander
3. Grabbing a Mac app’s icon: advanced Bash usage

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Dammit. Again with the Lipsum.

Ok, this is the last TextExpander Lipsum post, I promise (with my fingers crossed). I’m posting a full TextExpander group with all of the TextExpander random Lorem Ipsum generators I’ve posted so far (LoremIpsum.com, LoremIpscream), plus some new ones based on the Kwisatz Haderach¹ generator. That one seemed to make a few people pretty happy (looking at MacSparky). It combines word lists from various “universes,” including Dune, Foundation, Ringworld, Harry Potter and Doctor Who (Doctor Who courtesy of the always-fabulous Kelly Guimont).

Here’s a sample snippet of Kwisatz Haderach text:

Grim Dark Liz Shaw remembrall crysknife mentat River Song gillyweed Zensunni Astrid Peth science fiction. Filt Plug ayat bi-la kaifa Polly Wright Gringotts. Suk Mahdi Gamont Rani guild Peri Brown Siona Cthalctose bludger mish mish. Basilisk travel Hufflepuff solari mentat Shadout Mapes ibad. Caid Tractite specials Chula Ian Chesterton Jal Karath inkvine Atraxi gom jabbar karama Killoran Shai Hulud musky Lords Of Jelsen.

The Kwisatz Haderach set I threw together for TextExpander is multi-faceted, and includes some HTML versions of the snippets, which are of more use to web designers than just plain text. There are snippets for one, two and three paragraphs of Kwisatz text, and versions of the same which include <p> tags. There are also short and long HTML list generators for both ordered (<ol>) and unordered (<ul>) lists. To avoid the pains of parsing HTML in the shell (KH doesn’t currently have an API), they’re Ruby-based. I’m not going to post the code here, just download the package below. TextExpander users can just expand the archive and double click the .textexpander file to install it. If you want the raw code for something else, just contact me.

The scripts are easily editable to change the number of paragraphs and minimum words per paragraph, as well as the number of items in the lists, by using the variables at the top of the scripts. They should be pretty self explanatory, just replace the existing numbers with your preferred quantities.

Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. TextExpander lipsum followup, with ice cream
2. Markdown snippets for TextExpander touch
3. Dammit. Again with the Lipsum.

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at One more time: TextExpander Lipsum snippets with kwisatz​.hadera​.ch

_why’s Chunky Bacon¹ is nice, and Sailing Three Tuesdays² (whose slug is “emo,” appropriately) is hilarious. There’s even one (Soylent Cream) which spits out fake identities³, and there are German and Czech flavors, too. Try them out on the website and then just paste a line like this in a TextExpander snippet set to “Shell Command”:

#!/bin/bash
curl "http://loremipscream.com/flavors/chunky_bacon/serving.txt"

That will spit out a nice, small chunk of random text in your preferred flavor. Of course, you could always make a few different snippets to suit any mood. For reference, here’s the API info, and here are the available flavors and their slugs:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<flavors>
  <flavor>
    <name>Vanilla</name>
    <slug>vanilla</slug>
  </flavor>
  <flavor>
    <name>Mint Chocolate Czech</name>
    <slug>mint</slug>
  </flavor>
  <flavor>
    <name>Sailing Three Tuesdays</name>
    <slug>emo</slug>
  </flavor>
  <flavor>
    <name>Soylent Cream</name>
    <slug>soylent</slug>
  </flavor>
  <flavor>
    <name>Texas Toast</name>
    <slug>toast</slug>
  </flavor>
  <flavor>
    <name>German Chocolate</name>
    <slug>chocolate</slug>
  </flavor>
  <flavor>
    <name>Chunky Bacon</name>
    <slug>chunky_bacon</slug>
  </flavor>
  <flavor>
    <name>Neapolitician</name>
    <slug>neapolitician</slug>
  </flavor>
</flavors>

I should also take the opportunity to mention another cool take on the “greeking” text idea: Kwisatz Haderach, which my friend (and TUAW blogger) Kelly Guimont has been contributing to. Have a look, it’s fun stuff. You can always make non-random TextExpander snippets out of whatever is going to be the most useful to you. Assuming Lorem Ipsum is useful to you, which is probably a poor assumption to make. I think we’ll both survive this, though.

If you haven’t seen my last TextExpander bonanza, check it out to see what else it can do. That one includes some good static Lipsum snippets and HTML Lipsum, amongst some neat tricks. I’ve posted a few other TextExpander experiments, some more useful than others. Have a look, see if anything helps you out!

Related posts:

1. Additional Characters for TextExpander
2. One more time: TextExpander Lipsum snippets with kwisatz​.hadera​.ch
3. Filesystem navigation with TextExpander

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at TextExpander lipsum followup, with ice cream

The XML from lipsum.com must be malformed, although I only say that because System Events would not parse it in AppleScript. I resorted to Bash scripting, and probably did a pretty kludgy job of it, but it works.

You can adjust the following script to return anything from 1 word to 20 paragraphs (or more) of random Lorem Ipsum. Just change the query values in the curl call: what (words, paras, or bytes), amount (self-explanatory, I hope) and the “start” parameter tells it whether or not to begin the line with “Lorem Ipsum dolor sit…” or make it completely random. I’m going with random.

Sure, you could use this from the shell and pipe it to pbcopy, but a TextExpander snippet seemed like just the thing. Just create a new snippet and set the type to “Shell Script.” Then, paste this code in, modifying as you see fit.

#!/bin/bash
 
curl -s 'http://www.lipsum.com/feed/xml?amount=2&what=paras&start=0'| \
xpath '//lipsum' 2>/dev/null | \ 
sed -e 's/<lipsum>//' -e 's/<\/lipsum>//'| \
awk -F"\n" '{print $1"\n"}'

For whatever that’s worth…

Related posts:

1. TextExpander lipsum followup, with ice cream
2. One more time: TextExpander Lipsum snippets with kwisatz​.hadera​.ch
3. Dammit. Again with the Lipsum.

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Random Lipsum for TextExpander

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -wKU
 
require 'open-uri'
require 'cgi'
 
USER_NAME = 'username' # Your login name
API_KEY = 'yourlongapikey' # http://bit.ly/a/your_api_key
 
def entity_escape(text)
  text.gsub(/&(?!([a-zA-Z0-9]+|#[0-9]+|#x[0-9a-fA-F]+);)/, '&')
end
 
def make_link(text)
  case text
  when %r{\Ahttps?://.*?\.\w{2,4}.*?\z}:
    entity_escape(text)
  when %r{\A(www\..*|.*\.\w{2,4})\z}:
    "http://#{entity_escape text}"
  when %r{\A.*?\.\w{2,4}\/?.*\z}:
    "http://#{entity_escape text}"
  else
    nil
  end
end
 
url = make_link %x{__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING=$UID:0x8000100:0x8000100 pbpaste}.strip
res = open("http://api.bit.ly/v3/shorten?login=#{USER_NAME}&apiKey=#{API_KEY}&longUrl=#{CGI.escape(url)}&format=txt").read unless url.nil?
 
begin
  print res unless res.nil?
rescue
  exit
end

The API can output JSON and XML, which would be more appropriate on most occasions, but the “txt” format (which only includes the shortened link) is perfect for this situation. Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. TextExpander experiments
2. SMS from the command line with Google Voice
3. A System Service for to. url shortening

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at TextExpander: bit.ly with authentication

Just create a new plain text snippet, title it “Placeholder Image,” give it whatever shortcut makes sense to you, and then add this code:

<img src="http://placehold.it/%fill:width%x%fill:height%/333333/dddddd&text=%fill:title%" alt="%fill:title%" width="%fill:width%" height="%fill:height%" />

It uses TextExpander 3’s Fill feature to get the width, height and title from you before it inserts the image tag. If you have multiple words in your title, use plus signs (+) instead of spaces (url encoded). I’ll be turning this into a TextMate snippet soon, too, and I’ll post that when I have another minute. I’d love to hear about any other great tools you’re using!

Related posts:

1. Dynamic placeholder images, now with kittens
2. Placeholder image TextMate Snippet
3. Natural language dates for TextExpander

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Instant placeholder images with TextExpander

Most of my snippets are specific only to me, such as email signoffs and abbreviations for companies I work for. I have a few more general snippets, though, so that’s what I’m sharing. For reference, I’m currently experimenting with triggering only after a Tab press, a la TextMate tab-triggers. That shouldn’t make a difference on many of these, they should work with whatever you have set up.

All of the snippets I’m sharing are available for download. For more detail, read on…

Lorem Ipsum

First, there are the Lipsums. This is a collection of my most-used Lorem Ipsum snippets, great for filling in fields when testing forms, making quick HTML markup for CSS styling, or anywhere you just need to fill up some space. I have snippets for 1, 2, and 3 paragraphs of standard Lorem Ipsum text, as well as a few for HTML-specific lipsum. The king of these is a snippet I pulled from http://html-ipsum.com/ that inserts all of the major elements of HTML markup. It’s great for giving your CSS stylesheet a quick test to make sure you’ve covered the basics.

The Tools collection is a sampling of scripts and snippets, some more useful than others, that I’ve been experimenting with (and, in some cases, making good use of). Some examples:

Hyphenate clipboard

I tend to write out very long, multi-word modifiers that need hyphenation. While it’s more effective to use a System Service, I’ve found that the Automator services are too slow for such simple operations. So I cut the needs-to-be-hyphenated text to the clipboard and type „-. When I hit tab, the hyphenated version is pasted, with proper attention to punctuation and leading/trailing spaces. It looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -wKU

# get the clipboard using pbpaste
clip = %x{__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING=$UID:0x8000100:0x8000100 pbpaste}
# print it out, hyphenated
print clip.gsub(/\b\s\b/,'-')

Encode email address

This one takes an email address from the clipboard and returns a “mailto:” link with the email address itself encrypted, at least to the point where it’s not human readable anymore.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -wKU

clipboard = %x{__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING=$UID:0x8000100:0x8000100 pbpaste}.strip
print "mailto:#{$2.gsub(/./) {sprintf("&#x%02X;", $&.unpack("U")[0])}}" if clipboard =~ /\A(mailto:)?(.*?@.*\..*)\z/

Paste Markdown references

This one parses the clipboard for any and all urls, pasting the resulting matches as a Markdown reference list. It automatically names the references based on the url’s domain, strips duplicate urls and sorts the list alphanumerically by reference name. If the clipboard is already a reference list, it will sort it and remove duplicates before pasting it. You can then use the references in your Markdown to link to the associated URL, or just make the list look nice in an email or other non-rendered document.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -rjcode -Ku
clipboard = %x{__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING=$UID:0x8000100:0x8000100 pbpaste}.strip
links = clipboard.scan /(?:\[([^\]]+)\]\: )?(https?:\/\/[^ \n\r"]+)/m
norepeat = []
output = []
exit if links.nil?

links.each {|url|
  fresh = true
  output.each {|a|
    fresh = false if a['link'] == url[1]
  }
  next unless fresh

    if url[0].nil?
        domain = url[1].match(/https?:\/\/([^\/]+)/)
        parts = domain[1].split('.')
        name = case parts.length
            when 1,2: parts[0]
            else parts[1]
        end
    else
        name = url[0]
    end

  name = "itunes" if url[1] =~ /(itunes|phobos).apple.com/

    while norepeat.include? name
        name = name =~ / ?[0-9]$/ ? name.next! : name = name + " 2"
    end
    output << {'title' => name, 'link' => url[1] }
    norepeat.push name
}

output.sort {|a,b| a['title'] <=> b['title']}.each { |x| puts "[#{x['title']}]: #{x['link']}" }

Shortening URLs

There are 4 commands in the group for shortening URLs, using bit.ly, go., is.gd and tinyurl, respectively. There are some AppleScript-based commands already available which do this, but I like the string-handling flexibility of Ruby a little better (and it processes a tiny bit quicker, as well).

The basic command looks like this, with slight differences for each service:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -wKU

require 'open-uri'
require 'cgi'

def entity_escape(text)
  text.gsub(/&(?!([a-zA-Z0-9]+|#[0-9]+|#x[0-9a-fA-F]+);)/, '&')
end

def make_link(text)
  case text
  when %r{\Ahttps?://.*?\.\w{2,4}.*?\z}:
    entity_escape(text)
  when %r{\A(www\..*|.*\.\w{2,4})\z}:
    "http://#{entity_escape text}"
  when %r{\A.*?\.\w{2,4}\/?.*\z}:
    "http://#{entity_escape text}"
  else
    nil
  end
end


url = make_link %x{__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING=$UID:0x8000100:0x8000100 pbpaste}.strip

print open("http://bit.ly/api?url=#{CGI.escape(url)}").read unless url.nil?

I’ll stop there for now. The Tools set also contains:

• Clipboard HTML link

  Makes an html hyperlink (code, not rich text) from a url in the clipboard. Uses the Fill feature to request the link text.

• Markdown Link

  Makes a Markdown format link from a url in the clipboard. Uses the Fill feature to request the link text.

• Rounded Corners

  Uses the Fill feature to request a pixel radius, and creates cross-browser CSS for rounded corners. There are 5 variations, one for each corner and one for all corners.

• CSS Reset

  Your typical CSS reset code, in Meyers and YUI flavors.

• Make URL

  Take whatever text is in the clipboard and provide a best-guess URL for it. Handy if you have a qualified domain and just need the protocol added, or if you have an email address and want it to be a mailto: link.

• Hashbang

  Instant hashbangs for ruby, osascript and bash.

Feel free to download, explore and improve!

Related posts:

1. Markdown snippets for TextExpander touch
2. TextExpander: bit.ly with authentication
3. New: TextExpander downloads with custom prefixes

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at TextExpander experiments