Nov 12
2009

This is a quick and dirty Snow Leop­ard Ser­vice that scrapes Songza.fm to find a song related to your selected text in most appli­ca­tions. It replaces the selected text with an is.gd short­ened link and the name of the first song it found (just to be sure you’re on the same page… lit­er­ally). The code is also avail­able as a Text­Mate com­mand for those inter­ested. Update: Text­Mate com­mand with link selec­tion popup.

The ser­vice (and Text­Mate com­mand) require the Hpri­cot gem for ruby. In most cases, this should be instal­lable from the com­mand line with sudo gem install hpricot. If you see errors, you may need to update some Ruby com­po­nents. Once that’s set, just install the work­flow in ~/Library/Services and it should imme­di­ately start show­ing up in your ser­vices menu. Add a short­cut for it in Pref­er­ences -> Key­board -> Short­cuts -> Ser­vices. Next time you’re tweet­ing or writ­ing an email about a song, why not send a Songza link to back up your point?

Con­tinue read­ing “Songza Lucky Link Service…”

Nov 03
2009

It may take me a while to con­vert my setup back to the old days of Text­Mate blog­ging. I’ve pri­mar­ily been blog­ging for TUAW, which uses a blog­ging sys­tem with very poor XMLRPC sup­port. The end result of this, for me, was the devel­op­ment of an elab­o­rate Text­Mate bun­dle which emu­lated the ease-of-use that Text­Mate pro­vides to blog­gers on Word­press (and other plat­forms). I have, I guess, for­got­ten how to do this. So this post is going to begin as a test, to be con­tin­ued with some ideas, some tools, and some dis­cov­er­ies I’ve made in my time away from the glory of Text­Mate blogging.

This para­graph is just to see if I can get an XMLRPC image upload to float left with­out addi­tional Mark­down code.