I have long kept a journal–more precisely, a log–using VoodooPad with the Scratchpad scripts by Ian Beck. It’s been a great system, but after years of usage it’s started to become a bit cumbersome. VoodooPad can handle the load, but running the custom scripts is inconvenient on a document with thousands of pages. In the interest of trying new things (and fiddling away some time this evening), I decided to try switching the system over to Day One.
dayone, logging, productivity
I wanted to share a handy tool that I realized I use daily but rarely talk about. I call it Read2Text, but it’s really just a Frankenstein script which combines Python Readability (license) with html2text (license). The combination allows you to grab web pages, process them with a port of Arc90’s Readability and convert the HTML to Markdown, ready for pasting or piping to a text file.
markdown, productivity
I’ve compiled a list of some of my favorite apps from 2011. I wrote a TextMate command to link all of these1 (60+ links in four minutes!), so if you spot any misfire links that I missed, let me know in the comments. This isn’t an all-inclusive list (despite its length), but it’s a good chance to highlight some gems that may have passed under the radar of the big sites.
apps, roundup
Well, here it is: my last Geeklet post of 2011. I think it’s the simplest Geeklet I have, but it’s kind of fun. It uses the I ♥ Quotes API to put a random quote on your desktop.
geeklet, geektool, nerdtool
We’re having a low-key holiday this year. I mean really low-key. Aditi’s napping on the couch, the dogs are all sleeping, the cats and the bird are lazily preening themselves and I just fixed Markdown QuickTags.
Wordpress, markdown, mdqt, plugin, quicktags
VoodooPad is a powerful note-collecting, wikifying, productivity machine. With the right scripts, you can make just about anything happen, at least within the realm of text, images and web pages. VoodooPad has a built in web server, and can export your notebook as a full website, with links intact. I like the web export the best, because it gives me a crazy amount of control over the output. To that end, I built a website using nothing but VoodooPad, hopped up on some custom scripts. I can…
voodoopad, webdesign, wiki
As I’ve mentioned before, I keep todo.taskpaper files in my web and code project folders. These allow me to keep track of bugs, ideas, notes, etc., and the archive it creates helps me remember what I did, when I did it and how it worked. I like having them separated per project; it’s the way my one-track mind works. I like the plain-text format because I can use any variety of methods (including TaskPaper itself) to manipulate and quickly update the files. This gave me the idea to…
productivity, scripting, taskpaper, terminal
Marked 1.3.2 is up and includes all of the features I mentioned a couple of days ago. If you already have Marked, open up the App Store and check for updates. If you’ve been waiting to pick up a copy, now’s a good time!
marked
I finally got around to writing a script to auto-generate the documentation for my DefaultKeyBinding.dict file. The script now reads my comments in the file and creates tables of keystrokes and descriptions ready for GitHub. From now on, my fickle changes will be reflected in the readme.md file in the repo and the keystrokes will stay current. You can see the current output here.
documentation, keybindings, scripting
Marked v1.3.2 has been uploaded and is waiting for review. This release, despite being an incremental version number, has some exciting new features. Here’s a preview of the changelog:
markdown, marked, multimarkdown, news
